Assault with a Deadly Lie

by Lev Raphael

  I breathed in deeply, trying not to tear up, and she patted my arm.

  “Did they hurt you?” she asked.

  I shook my head, and tried to say something, but she guessed it. “Yes, I know, it’s on the inside. I won’t tell you it’s going to pass, because nobody can know that. The first time I got dragged off a picket line I thought I was a hero, but after being roughed up and held in jail for forty-eight hours, I felt like a worm. Just take care of each other, okay?” She turned and strode down the steps and off along the street to her Cape Cod, the only one on our street. As I closed the door, I had the eerie feeling I was being watched, and I heard a car speed down our street, where the limit was twenty-five miles per hour. When I opened the door again, the car was gone. Paranoid, I thought. You will always be paranoid now, till the day you die. My beautiful, peaceful home had become a cul-de-sac of dread. But I had to suppress what I was feeling—right then, anyway, to deal with Stefan.

  I brought the cake into the kitchen and relayed Binnie’s message. Stefan moaned, “Everyone at church will know! I can’t ever go back.”

  I set down the cake on the table littered with opened sections of the New York Times, and crouched by his side. “Listen, they love you at St. Jude’s, I’ve seen it at the Christmas parties we’ve gone to, they all think you’re special. And even if they didn’t, church is the best place for you to go! You feel at home there. You wrote a book about it, remember?”

  He smiled faintly, and Marco headed off his lap for a drink of water. “Is that Binnie’s coffee cake?” Stefan asked, sounding marginally more positive, and as if I hadn’t already told him. I nodded, and he rose to take off the dome. I brought out plates, forks, and a cake knife and we sat at the island to have dessert before dinner, which seemed a harmless reversal of order after what we’d been through the past few days. I needed to get my footing back, somehow. I wished I had some kind of large, detail-ridden project that could still my murky free-floating sense of panic and help me focus on something constructive. But all I had right then was a crumbly, sweet, coffee cake made with freshly ground cinnamon. It could have been worse.

  Well, probably not, because I had to tell him about the call Celine had gotten, and that I’d had a brief interview with Detective Valley. He took that like a punch-drunk fighter. He sat there, playing with his fork, shoulders hunched, eyes drawn inward, so I fed Marco his dinner, let him out into the yard, and decided to make the eggplant dish myself. I cheated and used prepared sauce for the bottom of the baking dish, but went ahead and sliced and blanched the eggplants, pureed some cottage cheese, mixed in the Parmesan, mozzarella, garlic, lemon zest, nutmeg, pepper and salt. I talked to him about the rest of my time at the office, discussed the three authors, one of whom he’d been on a panel with.

  I was surprised when he ignored the gossip and said, “Valley’s back? I hate that man. He should be shot.” He pronounced his sentence dully, as if talking about cleaning up a messy garage, not offing another human being. But strangely, that made me think of the gun shop I’d visited years ago, the feel of a pistol in my hand, the sense of threatening power and strength I hadn’t expected. What would I do if I had one?

  Clearing the table of the Times, I noticed one section was open to a book review of something called Erroneous, and the author’s photo shocked me. It was Stone Castro-Hirsch, a mercurial, acerbic, foulmouthed essayist who edited a Jewish literary magazine called Nu? (Yiddish for “So what?”) He had once asked Stefan for an essay at a point in his career when Stefan had stopped writing “on spec”—that is, without a definite commitment to publish. Stefan was always happy to work with editors to get pieces where they needed to be, but Stone not only rejected the piece outright, he slammed Stefan in an email: “This is the worst shit I’ve ever read by any author living or dead. I can’t believe you thought I’d waste my time with something this hopeless.” I’d read the essay and it wasn’t Stefan’s best work, but Stone’s comments struck me as unhinged.

  Stefan had fumed for a few days, composing and recomposing a blistering email reply which he wisely never sent. I urged him not to, since I assumed Stone was volatile and troubled, and definitely worth staying away from. He was the kind of person who couldn’t fart without mentioning it on Facebook and was notorious there for defriending people for the most trivial reasons, or none at all.

  But despite Stefan’s silence (or because of it?), somehow Stone took a dislike to him and every now and then we’d hear he had trashed Stefan somewhere in print or even at a party of litwits. I skimmed the Times review now: the book was a collection of Stone’s own essays from Nu? with one written just for the book, called “Traitors.” It apparently singled out Stefan. There was a quote in the review about Stefan’s conversion to Catholicism as “shameful, cowardly, revolting, superstitious, and ignorant,” and Stefan himself was branded “one of the worst enemies the Jewish people have ever faced in their history, finishing what Hitler started.”

  Stefan and his publisher had gotten a fair amount of hate mail a few years back when his conversion memoir came out, but the overwhelming response by reviewers and readers had been laudatory. Invitations to speak had descended from across the country and he had to hire a graduate student to help him keep track of all the requests and sort the ones he found most interesting. Most Jewish newspapers and magazines—including Nu?—had quietly ignored the book, not wanting to give him any more publicity than he was getting already, since it sold close to half a million copies in hard cover, and even more as an ebook.

  Stefan came over to the table. “I heard last year that Stone told an audience I was the author he most detested. He said I was despicable and didn’t deserve to live.”

  I was surprised he could be so casual about what sounded dangerously close to a death threat. “You never mentioned him saying that.”

  Stefan looked exhausted. “Nick, it’s not important, he’s a crank, he’s a malcontent. He sees all these people around him in New York who are richer, more famous, better looking, who get better press, and he can’t stand it. But he doesn’t want to pick a fight with somebody there, so he takes shots at people like me outside his circle.”

  The oven timer rang for the Rollatini and when I turned from the table, I said, “What if this essay was just part of his plan? What if he’s out to really hurt you, for whatever sick reason? What if he’s the one following me—” I stopped, mortified that I’d added to Stefan’s burden. He cocked his head at me and I told him about the car I thought was behind me earlier. But I didn’t give him a chance to react. “Stone is clearly obsessed with you, Stefan. If he’s the one stalking us, you’ve got to do something, call the police.”

  As soon as I said those last words, I regretted my stupidity.

  He grimaced sourly. “You’re kidding, right? You think I’d call the police for anything?”

  “No, sorry. That was a reflex. I’m really sorry.”

  Later that night, with Stefan snoozing in the living room in front of an NCIS episode on TV that we’d seen half a dozen times, I couldn’t help myself. I googled Stone, well aware that if he knew what I was doing, Stefan might hit me with one of his favorite Gospel quotations, “Who can touch pitch, and not be defiled by it?”

  And after wading through five minutes of muck, I discovered that Stone was a lot closer than New York, ominously close. He was teaching in a summer writing workshop at SUM’s small branch campus in Ludington, just a few hours northwest of Michiganapolis.

  We had a condo in Ludington.

  I couldn’t believe this was a coincidence.

  9

  I loved Ludington, and thinking of that creep in one of my favorite Michigan locales really troubled me.

  Situated on Lake Michigan, Ludington was a scenic little town, with a touch of New England charm to it—in my eyes, anyway. It had once been the hub of the Michigan lumber industry and a major port on the Great Lakes. Nowadays its business was tourism, boating, fishing, camping, and hunting. With fewer than ten t
housand citizens, it was celebrated for its pretty beaches and harbor, and its historic lighthouse was ranked Michigan’s most beautiful. After more than a century, Ludington still had a working car ferry line—the S.S. Badger—that took you across to Wisconsin.

  We’d visited Ludington now and then since moving to Michigan, and before the stock market crashed in 2008, Stefan and I had bought a condo there after selling the cabin we owned a few hours further north near the larger town of Charlevoix. The upkeep on the cabin had become too burdensome: the electricity went out too often, pipes froze, the roof was going, the foundation cracking. Once his father and stepmother—who had given him the cabin—were dead, Stefan didn’t want to go up there anymore. I understood and didn’t mind having a shorter drive for weekend getaways. Selling it was easy even though it needed work, because it had some prime frontage on the lake.

  Ludington wasn’t as wealthy a town as Charlevoix, didn’t have a plethora of great restaurants, but it still had Lake Michigan and the gorgeous sunsets. We could watch those from our loft bedroom. There was only one large room downstairs with an open sleek kitchen, and the full bathroom on that floor wasn’t very big, but all of that was fine with us since we hadn’t bought it to entertain guests. It was a true getaway. In Ludington, we slept late, walked the beach, biked, and generally acted as if we were from much further away than Michiganapolis.

  We’d bought it before getting Marco, and the condo didn’t allow pets, but he was very happy at the kennel where he was boarded and a favorite with the staff because of his sweet disposition. We never stayed for more than a long weekend, which was usually enough time to help us chill out, and we’d been coming there long enough to have our favorite bistro, Blue Moon, which served the Canadian specialty poutine, and our favorite funky coffee shop, Redolencia.

  But how was there a writing workshop at the Ludington campus of SUM that I hadn’t heard about? I was on sabbatical, but wasn’t that much out of touch, was I? And why hadn’t Stefan been involved as SUM’s writer-in-residence? Then I realized that Stefan must have been aware, which was why he had offered so many vague excuses a week ago when I suggested we take some time at the condo. He didn’t want to be in town when it was happening.

  I took Marco out one last time and then headed up to bed, figuring Stefan would wake up in the living room eventually and follow.

  Yes, I knew about the workshop,” Stefan admitted sleepily at breakfast Saturday morning, only marginally more present than the day before. “And I didn’t say anything, because Stone makes you crazy.”

  Stefan wasn’t exaggerating. Once he’d calmed down about Stone trashing his essay all those years ago, I’d grabbed the torch of resentment and kept it burning. I was furious enough that if I had seen one of Stone’s books in a local bookstore, I would have slipped it behind others so nobody would find it. As my cousin Sharon liked to say: “You’re a Taurus. You guys can simmer for years.” Stone was my personal allergen. I’d hear or read his name and I’d feel miserable and pissed off. His name worked on me like the stench off the clothes of a chain smoker.

  “I was invited by the arts group in Ludington that’s renting space from SUM at that little conference center,” Stefan said after pouring himself more coffee. “And I asked who else was coming to do workshops and readings. When I heard Stone had already accepted, I passed. And then I didn’t want to think about it or talk about it.”

  Spoken like a true introvert. Extroverts like me have to work at keeping things to ourselves.

  “So all this shit starts happening to us,” I said. “And your nemesis turns out to be in Michigan, and nearby? Tell me that’s not suspicious.” I’d been at the same place before—we had, actually—mentally slipping a seemingly ordinary person into the frame of a mug shot.

  Stefan forked up some of his asparagus omelet, chewed thoughtfully, and said, “How would he associate Ludington with us?”

  “Because you’ve written about it, remember? For that anthology about Michigan small towns? The one that won a prize and was reviewed in the Times?”

  “Oh, right. I forgot.” Stefan’s popularity had exploded after his memoir came out and he was constantly getting asked to contribute to anthologies, to do blurbs for new books, to contribute to publishing-related projects or causes.

  “Somebody like that,” I said, “hoovers down the Times and the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker. You know the type. And he hates you. He probably memorizes your good reviews and figures out ways to undermine them.”

  “You think he’s that vicious.”

  “I know he is. He sent you the craziest, nastiest rejection you ever got in your whole career.”

  “Granted. But how would he turn us into the target of a SWAT team?”

  “How would anyone do it? It happens. You told me. Vanessa told us. Tips come in all the time. The cops end up targeting the wrong people by mistake. Sometimes it’s faulty intelligence, and sometimes they’re set up to do it. That’s what happened. We need to go to Ludington.”

  Stefan shook his head.

  I was not backing down. “Listen, if Stone is behind everything that’s been going on, I want to confront him. I want to look him in the eye.”

  “And do what? Get him to confess like in a mystery novel? The villain only does that when he’s about to kill somebody and he’s gloating.”

  “Stone is always gloating. He’s a smug sonofabitch. He’s a nasty piece of work and he’s made a career out of it, trashing people he isn’t going to need for favors.” That was the draw of his nasty little magazine, of course. People read it for schadenfreude, enjoying eviscerations in reviews and articles of writers they envied. It was a niche market, and surprisingly successful.

  “I wouldn’t mind getting away,” Stefan said, eyes distant. “But what about Marco? You know the kennel is usually pretty booked in the warm weather, especially on weekends.”

  I’d thought of that already. Binnie Berrigan had a miniature poodle who got along beautifully with Marco when we met on walks. Binnie had more than once offered to take care of Marco if we ever needed her to. I reminded Stefan of that and said, “Let me call her and see if she’s available the next couple of days.” I did, and she was.

  Binnie was our nicest neighbor, aside from Vanessa, whom we barely knew, though she had shared unbelievable intimacy with us because of our night of terror and its aftermath. The rest of our nearest neighbors weren’t dog people, so we didn’t interact much. “Fred and Ethel” were our neighbors to the south, an elderly retired couple who were always squabbling in the garden, each one digging up and moving flowers and shrubs as if shifting furniture around a room, and always without consulting the other one. Their name was actually Kurtz, and that and their quarrelsomeness reminded us of the Mertzes on I Love Lucy.

  We never spoke since I’d had a run-in with Mr. Kurtz a few years back when I was walking Marco and he peed on the Kurtz’s green plastic trash can down by the curb. Mr. Kurtz came shouting across his lawn, “You always let your dog do that! I have to carry that bin! I have to touch it!” I didn’t point out that Marco was too short to pee all the way up on the handles. I apologized and said it wouldn’t happen again, but he kept yelling at me even as I made my way down the block. “People like you spoil this neighborhood!” And a few minutes later he drove by me super-fast in his Dodge Caravan as if to scare me, or at least show me how angry he was.

  An equally charmless couple lived on our other side, Maude and Lewis Priebus, professors of music at SUM who only associated with their colleagues. After living there ten years, they had never had us over for coffee or a drink, even though we’d invited them to more than one of our parties—and they’d come. Both always wore black. She played viola and he was a pianist, so the music we heard from their windows was enjoyable, at any rate, especially when they had colleagues over for chamber music rehearsals. Across the street were mostly new people, including Vanessa, who had the house our friends and colleagues Lucille and Didier had owned before
taking jobs in Canada. We missed them, and other people we’d gotten to know too briefly before they moved away. Living in a college town was great for the lack of traffic, the slower pace of life and everything that went with that, but it also meant your friends often moved on to better jobs someplace bigger and more exciting. I wondered how long an East Coaster like Vanessa would last in Michiganapolis.

  Stefan had been cleaning up while I spoke to Binnie and when I got back to the kitchen, he said, “We’ll talk about Stone and Lucky and anyone else we can think of on the ride to the condo, okay?” He went off to pack a bag.

  I was glad to be in my SUV, a terrifically comfortable trip car, driving away from the home that no longer seemed safe. I imagined people who’d suffered through fires, hurricanes, or tornadoes felt the same way. The false sense of invulnerability that makes you watch other people’s disasters on TV with the knowledge this could never happen to you—well, that was gone, sanded clean away. And so Stefan and I were on the road, however briefly, perhaps doing what Tom does in The Glass Menagerie, “attempting to find in motion what was lost in space.”

  For a while, we were silent, just enjoying the distance that grew between us and home, the relative peace and quiet of the highway. We didn’t talk, as I thought we would. Then Stefan put in half a dozen CDs and we blasted classic rock: Led Zeppelin, The Stones, Cream, David Bowie, The Allman Brothers. I don’t know about him, but I felt young and reckless, I felt free. We actually sang along to some songs, making lousy, fun harmony.

  And when we drove into Ludington on Route 10 heading west to Lake Michigan, I felt becalmed. Something about driving through the cordon of mini-malls, lumber shops, motels, fast food outposts and then hitting the main street of Robber Baron mansions that had all been turned into guest houses was inevitably soothing for me. All that colorfully painted gingerbread was such a sharp contrast to what we had just passed through, as were the one-and two-story commercial buildings with ornate decorative Victorian stone work around the windows or along the roof lines, even displaying the dates of construction carved in relief by proud architects.