The Edge of Doom

by Amanda Cross

  “Perhaps,” Kate said. I would certainly like to say something exceedingly rude at this very moment, Kate thought, but did not utter the words. After all, her mother had not had a gun pointed at her at that particular moment, to say nothing of the other men present.

  “Even with so definite a refusal,” Charles continued, “I decided to leave it a while. The more certain upright types are of refusing to be dishonest or illegal, the more attractive the opportunity to be just that often becomes upon reflection, when they’ve had time to convince themselves they wouldn’t be doing anything really wrong. But not with your mama, as I discovered upon my return visit.

  “Of course, she didn’t want to see me, and told the servant to tell me she did not care to see me. I, however, had come prepared for this rejection, had asked the servant to return to her with a note I had written in advance for just such an eventuality. The note said—well, naturally I can’t remember the exact wording but it conveyed that she would certainly find herself acutely unhappy if she continued in her refusal to allow me an audience with her. It was a nice, formal, threatening note.

  “She let me come into her presence after that, and the odd thing is that I now suspect she thought it was Jay I was threatening to harm. But that didn’t occur to me at the time. So I took a seat across from her—she was making some sort of tapestry thing, I remember, needle being pulled way out on a long thread, then pushed through to the other side and pulled out again—and I promised her that if she didn’t agree to help me, I would go to her husband and offer him a similar bargain. In that case, of course, I would threaten to make public the fact that his daughter was not his. We didn’t have DNA then, so I could not have proved it, but I was certain once the idea was in his head, he would find plenty of reason to believe me. You didn’t exactly look like his other children, as you may have noticed.”

  Kate said that she had hardly in her youth paid much attention to any such dissimilarities between herself and her brothers, but certainly could both notice and remember the differences now.

  “And what did my mother say in answer to that?” Kate asked. By now she was altogether attentive, not to say transfixed.

  “Here’s the funny part,” Charles said, looking over at Jay. “She said that I should go right ahead and do whatever I had to do. She would play no role of any sort in any of it. Now that surprised me, so I went away and had a little think. And you know what I concluded, Jay old boy?” Charles turned toward Jay, who did not move. “Look at me when I talk to you,” Charles said, raising his gun a slight bit. Jay sat upright then and looked at Charles.

  “That’s better,” Charles said. “What I concluded was that, for the most part, your mother simply didn’t believe I would do it, would go to Mr. Fansler and tell him all about his wife’s hanky-panky, not to mention the fetching, hardly legitimate result now making a legitimate claim on his fortune and his sacred honor. Maybe that’s what she figured. But you know what else I think she figured, Jay old boy? Maybe not consciously, not altogether consciously, but figured all the same: that if the truth about her love affair was revealed, that if she was thrown out into the cold without a cent and her daughter cast off with her, well, then she would have to find you, wouldn’t she Jay, and make a life with you after all? Maybe she hadn’t been quite so certain about her decision to stay with Fansler; maybe she wanted to give fate one more chance to intervene. What do you think, Jay?”

  Kate did not look at Jay; she did not want to see his face. Instead, she turned slightly more toward Charles and said, “Please go on. I can’t sit on this stool forever, and I don’t mind telling you that I may just get down off it and walk away. If you or Fred decides to shoot me, that’s what you’ll have to do. And then you can shoot Jay, too. I’m quite serious, so please, let’s get to the end of this story.”

  Her only motive was to divert Charles’ attention away from Jay. But even as she spoke these threatening words, it occurred to her that they were not entirely untruthful. She straightened her back and lifted her feet from the rungs of the stool; she moved them about, even stretched them out. In doing so, she was reminded of sitting across from the cot in the maid’s room with her feet stretched out between Jay and Reed. But she must not think of Reed; for some reason her lucidity and dignity depended on not thinking about Reed. “Do get on with it,” she said again.

  “The woman I had married also moved in the same circles as the Fanslers, which is why the Fanslers had been at my wedding. Maybe, I had thought, I could make my wife my partner in this scheme and not have to tackle Mr. Fansler. But it didn’t take me long to realize that my wife, while she would no doubt be happy to take part in anything exciting, illegal, and dangerous, had all the self-discipline of a rutting ram. Ours, I’m afraid, was one of those alliances based on lust and the refusal to discover before marriage anything fundamental about our spouse-to-be. As I’ve said, we didn’t stay together long.

  “So it was back to Mr. Fansler I had to go. I went to see him in his office, probably the same sort of office where Jay went to call upon your brother Laurence. Oh, yes, I knew all Jay’s movements; once I’d identified you I had no problem following our boy every step of the way. Back then, however, when I was approaching Mr. Fansler, I think the poor man probably thought I’d come to beg for a job, or, anyway, his help in finding one. Once I sat down and began talking, of course, he was sadly disabused of such a speculation. I told him what I wanted, and what the price was.”

  “You told him,” Kate exclaimed. “You told him Jay was my father and all the rest of it?”

  “Yes, I did, my dear. He went white, absolutely white. I thought he was going to pass out, to tell you the truth, and I’d got out of my chair and moved over to him, but he waved me away. I poured him a glass of water—there was a carafe with glasses on a nearby table, it was that kind of office—but he just kept shaking his head. Then he said: ‘Get out!’ to me. He shouted it, and rose from his chair behind his desk. He swayed a minute, but held on to the desk, and then shouted again for me to get out and never come back. And then I understood.”

  “What?” Kate said, all pretense at indifference abandoned.

  “I realized he thought I had told him about Jay just for the hell of it, for the fun of upsetting him and making trouble; I could see that’s what he thought. ‘You’ve got it wrong,’ I said. ‘I may be a crook; I am a crook, but I’m not a mean, slimy bastard. I told you about Jay and your wife and your supposed daughter because I want something in exchange for not telling the world.’

  “Well, then he began to see. He called me a blackmailer and used every despicable name he could come up with, and then shouted at me again to get out.

  “ ‘But what about my proposition?’ I asked. ‘Shall I tell the world, or will you do what I ask? It’s not very difficult, and I won’t ask for information very often. I don’t want to risk my own reputation, never mind yours.’ Of course, he didn’t yet know what information I was after. Probably he thought something financial, insider-trading, that sort of thing. I didn’t sense that he could take in much more, so I said I was leaving. I put my card down on his desk. ‘Call me when you want to discuss this further,’ I said. ‘I won’t do anything in the meantime, but don’t keep me waiting too long.’ And I left.”

  “So he knew,” Kate said. “All along, he knew.”

  “Yes, my dear Kate, he knew almost from the beginning of your life. He certainly knew.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Your tale, sir, would cure deafness.

  Kate was stunned for a moment into immobility. Then, as though she were somewhere else, as though she were altogether unaware of her surroundings, she leapt from the stool onto her feet to stand facing Jay.

  “You might have told me that minor fact,” she said. “With all your storytelling, all your accounts of never-diminishing passionate love, you might have included the fact that my father knew all along. Didn’t it strike you that that was a rather, shall we say, momentous fact, something of sign
ificance?”

  Before Jay answered her, if indeed he meant to answer her, Fred and Charles were on their feet and, one on each side, lifted her back onto her stool. Kate could not believe she was being manhandled, but the force of their hands on her arms woke her to the actuality of the situation. Fred had his gun out and was looking at Charles for orders. Charles, having loosened his grip on Kate, and having waved Fred back to his stool, looked at Kate for a long moment and asked: “May I continue?”

  But Kate was not feeling as docile as she had been. “I don’t know how long we’ve been here, attending to your monologue about your life adventures,” she said, her tone dry, “but Reed is not going to sit home wondering what’s become of me for many more hours, I can promise you that. And if that means that Fred here is going to shoot me, I’m not sure that wouldn’t be preferable to perching on this stool listening to your narcissistic rendition.”

  “I understand that you’re upset by my revelation about your father—that is, your Fansler father, but try to contain yourself in patience a little longer. We haven’t been here as long as you suppose. And there isn’t much more to tell. But I do insist that Jay here attend to every word.”

  “Did my Fansler father play your game then?” Kate asked. She hoped Charles thought this was asked to hurry him along, but in fact she found that she had an urgent need to know the answer.

  “Yes, he did, being a sensible man who responded in a sensible way. After all, I wasn’t asking him to set me up for regular thieving from his associates and friends. We’d never have got away with it. No, we decided to go after one or two real gems, the second after an interval of some years, needless to say.”

  “He arranged for you to steal the valuable paintings of his friends?” Kate wanted to be quite sure she had this straight, had the exact truth of the matter.

  “Perhaps I better remind you how the system works, or worked then. It probably still does, in fact. You steal the painting, you keep it nice and safe, and then you offer to give it back for ransom. Ransom is usually ten percent of the market price, in that neighborhood anyway. So if a painting is worth ten million, it is returned for one million cash, no questions asked. Yes, you’re right, it is kidnapping, but the victim doesn’t suffer, and the owner of the painting suffers only in his pocketbook. Insurance companies are glad to get off at that price, and no one pursues the robber, let alone his informer. Nice and neat, isn’t it? Of course, insurance rates go up so everyone suffers to that extent, but most of them can afford it or they wouldn’t have bought the picture in the first place.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Kate said. But even as she spoke, she realized all that she had been willing to believe about Fansler business methods, about the ways in which the very wealthy acted and were treated in America. Why was helping Charles to steal pictures that he knew would be returned so different? The bigger question, after all, was why he had not told anyone about his daughter’s parentage.

  Charles was back to reading her thoughts. “I often wondered whether he told your mother he knew about Jay, but I finally determined that he had said nothing. Was it because he feared to be shamed in the eyes of the world, or because he loved her, in spite of it all, and was glad that she had remained in his home as his wife?”

  Kate turned to Jay. She had become quite expert at shifting herself around on the stool. “Remember that movie you keep talking about, the one where the man says he will love the woman all his life,” she asked Jay. Jay did not respond. “Do you remember how the movie ended?”

  When Jay did not answer her question, Charles waved his gun. “Answer the lady,” he said, “or I’ll let Fred here put a bullet in a not-fatal place. He’s itching to shoot that gun, I do assure you. He’s tired of sitting there doing nothing. Answer the lady nicely now.”

  “It ended at the railroad station,” Jay said. “She went off on the train.”

  “That’s how the lovers parted, not how the movie ended,” Kate said.

  “Might I know what movie we’re talking about here?” Charles asked.

  “Brief Encounter,” Kate said. “And the movie ends as it began, with the woman sitting at home with her husband; she is remembering the love affair from its beginning, in all its detail. The movie is a flashback. And at the end, her husband says to her, as though he had guessed what she had been, ‘Thank you for coming back to me.’ That’s how the movie ended. Funny that you didn’t remember that. Perhaps if you had remembered it you would have been less in a rage with Papa Fansler.”

  “May I get on with my tale? I’m beginning to feel like the ancient mariner,” Charles said. Kate waved a hand to say: go on. Charles spoke.

  “Where was I? Oh, yes. Well, before Papa Fansler and I had managed to kidnap our paintings, our friend Jay here was involved in stealing a painting. Maybe you’ve heard about that?” It was a question; Kate nodded in response.

  “I thought so. What he probably didn’t tell was that it was he who brought me in on the job. He and the guy whose picture it was couldn’t have robbed a newspaper from a blind vendor. We pulled it off exactly as planned. I frightened the two innocents by carrying a gun, but I didn’t expect to use it; I was just making sure that I didn’t run into trouble with no means of protecting myself. It all came off easy as could be, however, and that was that. Move up twenty years more or less. Can you do that Kate?”

  “I’m with you,” Kate said.

  “I wish you had been. I was involved in a big heist at a museum, much bigger than anything I attempted before, and one of the guards decided to be a hero. That screwed the whole thing up. We didn’t get the pictures, and the guard was shot and killed. Who by? I don’t know, but it wasn’t me. I know that for certain, because I didn’t fire my gun. The police took us all in, the museum got involved, the insurance company got involved, the security people got involved. There was a lot of publicity and outcry, and someone had to take the fall. It probably would have been one of my associates—a trigger-happy fellow like Fred here—except that our friend Jay offered to testify that he knew me to have a gun, to have committed art theft, and to be a likely suspect. He was a respected young architect, the best of witnesses. They believed him. They also promised to put him in the Witness Protection Program, even though I would be in jail, having been given a twenty-five to life sentence. It’s always supposed that the convicted felon may have associates on the outside who will take revenge on the man who testified against their comrade. That’s likelier with the Mafia and such, but it happens. Why did our Jay want to hide out, change his name, his place to live, all of it? Maybe he wanted a new life; maybe he wanted to punish himself for having been such a naughty boy with your mother. Your guess is as good as mine. You can imagine the rest. I said if I ever got out I would find him and kill him. I didn’t know he would make it so easy by quitting Witness Protection and doing the one thing that would assure my catching up with him—that is, of course, going to look for you.”

  “But what can you gain by killing him now?” Kate asked. “Or by killing me, too? Reed knows about this rendezvous; you’ve won really. You’ve found us both. You’ve made us sit on stools and listen to you and grow thirsty and damned cramped and uncomfortable. Why not just let us go? I’ll give you my word not to pursue you, which you probably won’t believe, but what could I accuse you of if I did go after you, which I promise not to do? I doubt that anyone would believe the story of what went on in this abandoned ice cream parlor.”

  “Yatter away,” Charles said. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m not going to kill Jay. At our time of life, what’s the point? I want to stagger out of here free, just as you suggest, and I do believe you that you won’t go after me or persuade your husband to go after me, or your brothers either. I don’t think they know that your father knew, by the way, in case you were wondering.”

  “I was,” Kate said.

  “No. He had to keep it altogether to himself. No one was to know but him, me, and Jay, and Jay wasn’t to know that Fans
ler knew, but that I couldn’t agree with. I told him I was going to tell Jay, but that no one else would ever know—and until this moment, I have kept my word.”

  “Is that why Jay testified against you?” Kate asked. “Because you told my Fansler father the truth.”

  “Got it in one,” Charles said. “You are smart, I’ll agree to that any day. I’m sure you’d have been just as smart with your Fansler father’s genes, but in a different way. Maybe you’d have cornered the market instead of lecturing about literature. Yes, Jay was crazy with anger when I told him I’d told Fansler who the father of his daughter was. I don’t know why it infuriated him so powerfully. I suspect that Fansler’s knowing made it a dirty secret instead of a beautiful romantic secret, but maybe I’m getting literary from talking to you so long.”

  There was a long silence. Kate studied Jay, the new, strange father she had found subtly attractive, the man whose appearance had been so exhilarating and troubling an event. What did she think of him now? That he was a man who had got stuck in a long-ago passion—like a fly in amber, Kate thought. Not an original analogy, God knew, but a fitting one. And finally he had left his hiding place, gone back to his profession, which he was good at, one had to grant him that, and gone in search of the only living evidence of his great love. But I won’t consent to be romantic evidence, Kate thought. I don’t want to serve as his redemption for having given false testimony. I think we had better part as though we had never met in Laurence’s club in the first place.