by Lev Raphael
“Aren’t you worried about running into people from the writing workshop, the organizers? They’ll be angry you said no to being part of it, but you’re here in town.”
“Fuck ’em,” he snapped.
It wasn’t Shakespeare, but it fit. We took a soothing fifteen-minute walk over to the Jamesport Brewing Company, a big, relaxed, high-ceilinged bistro-ish restaurant off the main drag that was always crowded and always friendly. The door was enormously heavy and shrieked when you opened it, but the food inside was great. They gave us our favorite, curtained four-person alcove table where we had privacy to talk, and to do all the people watching we wanted to. Stefan was as ravenous as if he’d run a marathon in record time, a race he’d trained long and hard for, denying himself all his favorite food and drink. He ordered pecan-crusted perch and I watched him chow down, wondering if there wasn’t something manic about the way he gobbled each mouthful.
“Aren’t you hungry?” he pressed.
I shook my head and took a sip of my Amstel Light. I’d ordered their cheese ale soup, but hadn’t eaten much. I’d become anxious each time the door opened, expecting police to come and drag me off for assaulting Stone. I imagined the headlines, because there was no way a story like that wouldn’t transfix a little town like Ludington.
“What if I’m wrong?” I asked. “What if it isn’t Stone who’s targeting us, or orchestrating it, or involved in any way at all?”
Before Stefan could answer, he muttered, “Look who’s here,” and I turned to see Stone weaving from the bar toward us, limping slightly. He was all in black now, and looked shifty.
“You know,” he said in an undertone when he reached us, “I once asked Christopher Hitchens why he never wrote anything about your memoir.”
I had no idea Stone was friends with the late atheist author of God Is Not Great.
Stone leaned toward us, “He said it wasn’t worth his time because Stefan was so obviously deluded, anyone with sense would see the desperation.”
Stefan didn’t even look up from his fish, and I expected him to explode, tip over the table and wrestle Stone to the ground. Or maybe that’s what I wanted to do. The people at tables closest to us, sensing the confrontation, had stopped talking, but Stefan just kept eating.
“I’m not done with you,” Stone said flatly and headed off.
When he was out of sight and presumably out the door, Stefan looked up at me and winked. He was actually ebullient. “That was supposed to flatten me? Hitchens was a great writer, I loved his essays. But I didn’t write my memoir for him, so who cares what he said to Stone?”
“If he even said anything.”
“Right. Too bad Hitchens didn’t attack me, though, if the story’s true. We could have sold twice as many books.”
Stefan was right. Controversy, even the fake kind, was great PR for a book.
“Nick, have the rest of my fries, they’re still warm.”
I finished them, marveling at how unpredictable life with an author could be. Writers can be so thin-skinned, even a compliment phrased in the wrong way can feel like an insult to them—but then a bad review can unexpectedly make a writer laugh. Or a review he didn’t get. How crazy was that?
“Stone wasn’t kidding when he threatened you,” I said, convinced once again that Stone was our man.
Stefan nodded. “His eyes,” he said. And now his face dimmed. “Did you see them? Cold. Hard. He was not kidding, you’re right. Maybe you got the better of him in the parking lot, but it won’t end there.”
“Why do you think he didn’t report me to the police?”
Stefan shrugged. “It gives him an edge, or he thinks so, anyway.” Then, speaking so softly that I might have missed it if I’d turned away, Stefan said without looking at me, “If I had the chance to kill him right now, right here in town, and get away with it, I’d do it.”
11
Sunday morning, we had breakfast at our favorite place, Sophie’s Lakeside Café, another easy walk from the condo. The bacon was crisp, the omelets were runny the way we liked them, the coffee strong and continuous. I loved everything about this neighborhood hangout: the nautical wallpaper border; the lighthouse prints and vintage photos of the harbor; the nets, wheels, and wooden anchors hanging on the walls; the captain’s hat the elderly cashier wore at a comic angle; the paper table mats crammed with tiny local ads. The waitresses were cheerful and chatty; but then so were all the regulars who talked about boats and barns and cottages and grandchildren, and repeated old jokes to an appreciative audience. We were newcomers, of course, and regulars smiled at us genially enough, but the waitresses knew our names, commented on whether we were early or late compared to our usual arrival time, and made us feel at home.
I don’t think my Belgian-born parents would have understood the charm of Sophie’s. My mother and father didn’t like servers to converse with them about anything but food, and the loose command of grammar you heard there would have appalled my proper mother and father: “them” instead of “those,” “come” instead of “came.” For me, it was all part of the atmosphere and blessedly far away from the pretentiousness of academia. And in a world of hyper-standardization, this café reminded me of an independent bookstore, relaxed, quirky, an outpost of individuality.
When we got home and were idly wondering what we’d do that day, my phone rang, and I panicked when I saw the caller ID: Binnie.
I shouted into the phone, “Something happened to Marco!”
“No, no, he’s fine,” Binnie assured me, but her voice was wavering.
“Then what?” I put her on speaker phone and set the phone on the counter as if to maintain a safer distance from the bad news, whatever it was.
“Marco didn’t want to play with any of the dog toys I had, so since I had your key for emergencies, I went over to your house to bring back some of his, because puppies deserve the best, right? And, well, I think there was some kind of burglary there—”
Stefan and I both stared at the iPhone as if it were radioactive.
“There was a broken laptop on the floor in the foyer, and I was sure neither one of you would have left a mess like that, so I called the police right away. I told them I was a neighbor with your key and you were out of town, and they’re sending someone over to investigate.”
“We’ll leave as soon as we can.”
“Good! They want to talk to me, of course, but they need to talk to you, too. So it’s good that you’re coming home as soon as you can …” Binnie sounded really rattled by her discovery; she wasn’t one to mindlessly repeat things you said.
I asked her how long ago she’d called the police. “Five minutes,” she said. “Not more. Or much more.”
Stefan said, “Binnie, are you all right?”
“Oh, yes, thanks. Thanks! I was startled, but I didn’t look around, I just got the hell out of there. When I was back in my own house, I felt safe.”
Lucky woman, I thought.
“Safer,” she added tentatively. “And Marco was adorable—he could tell I was upset and he was very cuddly. Anyway, I’m going to wait outside for the police car now.”
We thanked her, and I found myself apologizing for some reason, as if whatever happened had been my fault.
“Oh, go on with you,” she said, affecting an Irish brogue. I think she was trying to make me at least smile. I was beyond that.
The air conditioning was turned up high, but I was sweating anyway as we packed quickly, checking and re-checking to make sure we weren’t leaving anything behind, and that there was nothing in the fridge that would spoil while we were gone for however long it turned out to be. We didn’t speak. As we got ourselves ready to leave, we might have been two spies methodically preparing for a dangerous mission.
Closing and locking the door of our condo, it hit me that someone could burglarize this place, too. But there was nothing I could do about that now.
We packed the car and drove off in silence.
I was angry, but
only intellectually, as if I were studying a distant country on a map and observing its borders. I didn’t feel anything, not really. I kept seeing horrific images of vandalism in my head, spray-painted walls, dishes and glasses shattered all over the kitchen floor, bedding cut apart by knives. But they were muffled in a way, because they were just visions. I didn’t want to report that lurid private film, so I kept quiet. I suspected Stefan was living his own little hell, with images from the Holocaust of looted Jewish homes. If anything could trigger the trauma that had been passed on through his survivor parents, surely this news would do that as readily as the SWAT raid must have. And he was likely also thinking something close to what I was: “We have to deal with the Michiganapolis police again.” It was a loathsome prospect.
Though rowdy teenagers sometimes took bats to metal mailboxes at night or even set the chunky plastic ones on fire, crime was low in our neighborhood and we did not have a burglar alarm system for our house. Years before, we’d had exterior photoelectric security lighting installed at each corner of the roof and over all the doors. Coming on at dusk, the lights cast a warm amber glow that softened their purpose: deterrence. The electrician had explained, “They won’t stop anyone from breaking in, but it gives burglars a choice: your house or a house somewhere else in the neighborhood that doesn’t have any lights at all.”
I don’t think it had never occurred to either of us that burglars would hit any house, during the day, but I realized it was a very canny choice—who would be around to see them?
I wanted to speed to Michiganapolis at ninety miles per hour, but when we got to the highway, I put on cruise control so we never went above seventy-five; getting stopped for a speeding ticket would have made me choke with frustration at the delay. I wanted to be home—and yet I dreaded being home. I felt as if I were some nineteenth-century character in a French or Russian novel forced to fight a duel over an insult he hadn’t realized he’d uttered, and with a weapon he didn’t know how to use. It was a nightmare, and I was doomed.
What made it all the worse was that Stefan and I had each retreated into our own doubts and fears; we were sitting in the same car, but we were isolated from each other. However big or small it was, we should have been sharing this new tragedy, somehow. But what was I supposed to say to bridge the silence, and why did I have to be the one to stitch up what had been torn apart? I felt dizzy and almost nauseous; the news from Binnie was triggering the same fear I’d felt the night when our home was invaded and our lives changed forever.
Binnie called halfway into our drive and we put her on the speaker.
“They sent one policeman,” she said. “He checked the perimeter of the house, and didn’t find any signs of a break-in.”
Stefan said, “Huh,” under his breath.
“What happened next?” I asked, feeling puzzled.
“He asked me if I had looked around inside and I said no, so he went in, his gun drawn. He checked the whole house. Nobody was inside, and the only evidence he found was the laptop in the foyer.”
“That wasn’t us,” I assured her.
“I know, dear, and I told him so. You’re such neat boys—look at your beautiful yard! He left his card for you to call him as soon as you get home. I know this is serious, but I was almost laughing when he gave it to me. He’s got the oddest name, you’ll never believe it: Kidd Pickenpack.”
We thanked her and hung up. I felt oddly deflated. Our house had been invaded, somehow, and only one cop had been sent to investigate. Was that because we were still under suspicion somehow? Or was that standard for a possible burglary? My mouth felt very dry and I reached for the small bottle of water I’d stuck in the cup holder between me and Stefan. That seemed to shake Stefan out of his reverie, and he said, “Weird. Very weird.”
“How did it happen? How did anybody break into the house?” I asked. “Without any signs of anything?”
“You read all those mysteries. Somebody must have picked the lock.”
“Can you really do that?”
“Well, I can’t,” he said, with almost a trace of humor, but then he reverted to silence for another hour or more.
“It’s definitely not Stone,” Stefan finally blurted, as if his mind had been churning away every second since the last time he spoke. We were now about an hour from our exit.
“What? What do you mean? Why not him?”
“It’s obvious. Stone could have gotten the SWAT team to hit us, however he did it. And maybe he was stalking you in town? But there’s no way he could have burglarized our house when—” His words trailed off, and I knew why, and where he was going. He had realized that it didn’t add up as soon as he started ruling Stone out because he’d been in Ludington when we were.
“Stone knew—or assumed—we were staying in Ludington at the condo,” I said for Stefan, “and he could have driven to Michiganapolis late last night or even very early this morning.”
“Yup.”
“And driven back, and nobody at the writing workshop would know. Whatever Stone did at the house, he wanted to show us that he could, he wanted to keep us off-balance.”
“I think it’s working,” Stefan said flatly, and we didn’t say anything else until our exit, when I called Binnie to say we were almost home. We had to slow down first to thirty miles per hour, then twenty-five. It felt like crawling across glass as we wound so slowly through the minimalls, gas stations, industrial buildings to the newer suburbs with big houses and small trees, past the edges of the university that was a universe of its own, to our own quiet neighborhood whose houses had been built before World War II and whose towering maples and oaks were older still. The transitions usually made us calmer. As a friend had said, Michiganapolis was a nice place to leave, but an even better place to live. You could get to Chicago, Toronto, Detroit, New York very easily—but it was soothing to return.
Not today. Our street felt almost toxic to me, the cars parked in driveways, the well-tended lawns, the rose bushes, summer clusters of Foxglove, coneflowers and delphinium, and the mounds of variegated hosta everywhere seemed ominous, portentous. Our house had been raided just a few days ago; I had been threatened while walking Marco; we’d gotten threatening phone calls at home and on campus; and now we’d been the target of a burglar. Or burglars. Why not more than one? Why not a whole team? It was all starting to run together like some kind of whirlpool of misfortune and I couldn’t see myself breaking free.
Pulling into our driveway, I felt as crazed as if I were an American official besieged in one of our Middle Eastern embassies by a chanting mob. I had never had a migraine before in my life, and wondered if that’s what I was experiencing now. I felt dizzy, had a terrible taste in my mouth as if I were close to vomiting, and my forehead throbbed.
Wordlessly, we parked in the garage, took out our bags, let ourselves into the kitchen from the side door. There was also a back door to the kitchen which led to the fenced backyard and looked secure. But the room suddenly felt vulnerable to me, more vulnerable even than our sun room which opened onto the large brick patio with its Viking grill and suite of outdoor furniture. Two doors, I thought, two ways to get in. Two weak spots.
“We have to get an alarm system,” I said, putting down the Ralph Lauren leather duffel bag Stefan had bought me after sales of his memoir soared.
“Could we check the house first?” Stefan was carefully surveying the kitchen for signs of damage. When we’d had it remodeled it had seemed so solid and beautiful, now it struck me as just an empty gleaming shell.
“Whoa! You’re saying we don’t need one? What is wrong with you?”
“There’s nothing wrong with me, and you don’t have to yell. I’m standing right here.”
“I’m not yelling!” Of course I was, and I knew it, but I was feeling panicky. If at that moment he’d tried to quiet me down any further, I would have exploded, but he wisely backed off and continued making a circuit of the kitchen, his Prada duffel still in his right hand. He opened drawers, c
upboards, and the fridge.
I felt oddly as if I were an intruder in my own home. Stefan put his bag down and we left the kitchen. We found the broken laptop in the granite-floored foyer just as Binnie had said. It was the small Sony Vaio we used in the kitchen and the case was webbed with cracks. To my eyes, it looked more as if it had been dropped, rather than deliberately smashed: it was cracked and maybe even chipped, but not shattered.
“I don’t think we should mess with it until we talk to the cop.”
Just then, the doorbell rang, and we skirted the laptop to let Binnie in. She gave each of us a big hug, surprisingly big given how petite she was. “They’ll get the swine that did this,” she said. “I’m sure they will.”
“Marco?” I asked.
“I thought I’d wait till you were done cleaning up, and talking to the police, before bringing him over. Is that okay? It seemed calmer for everybody.”
“Very okay,” I said, admiring her clear thinking. It was my turn to give her a hug, and she left. I studied the business card. His name really was Kidd Pickenpack. I read aloud the Michiganapolis police motto: “Preserve, Protect, Defend.”
“Isn’t that what the president swears to do for the Constitution when he takes his oath?” Stefan asked, frowning.
“I think it is.”
I held the card out to him. “Do you want to call?”
He shook his head vigorously, as if to ward off some spell or curse, and backed away from the small white piece of card stock. “You call, I’ll look around.”
Stefan headed to his study, and I took out my phone. I got right through, explained who I was, and Officer Pickenpack said, “Ten minutes.” I said fine, and spent the time going through the living room, the dining room, the half bath, even the hall closet, looking for any trace of someone having been there, but this wasn’t like Will Smith in Enemy of the State where everything in his Georgetown home had been trashed and covered with graffiti. It was almost creepier. Why break into our house and just grab a laptop and then drop it? Could the burglar have been startled by something?