Dead Letter

by Jonathan Valin

  “And the document?”

  “Maybe he planned to sell it, as a final coup before leaving you holding the bag. Maybe that’s why he was killed on Tuesday morning—by whomever he was planning to sell it to.”

  “That’s a gruesome theory, Harry,” Sarah said.

  “Well, it’s the only one I can think of that explains both your father’s behavior and Bidwell’s. He hired me to keep an eye on you until he was ready to make his escape. At the same time, I was an insurance policy—good p.r. in case anything went wrong and he was found out. We’ll know for sure tomorrow. Lurman is going to get your father’s security file from Sloane. If he or one of his coworkers were suspected of espionage, it’ll show up there.”

  “You’re a clever man,” she said.

  It sounded a little too “clever” to me, too. Still, it was the best I could come up with. I said, “Let’s just hope I’m a clever man who’s right.”

  17

  IT BEGAN to snow around five that afternoon. Big wet flakes that stuck to the sidewalks and the streets. By a quarter of eight, five inches were on the ground and the air was so thick and white I couldn’t see twenty feet in front of me.

  “It’s beautiful,” Sarah said as we stood in the lobby, waiting for Sturdevant to bring one of the black Chevies around from the lot.

  “For Grimes. Not for us.” I turned to Lurman and said, “You and Sturdevant have to stand clear until we’ve finished talking with O’Hara. He might not see you in the snow, but let’s play it safe anyway. You’ll let us off on Kellogg and we’ll walk up the access road to the main parking lot. That’ll give you time to park the car in the Downs lot and position yourselves close to the rendezvous point. If there’s a commotion of any kind, I don’t want you guys so far away that you won’t be able to lend a hand.”

  “Sean won’t betray us,” Sarah said confidently.

  “Let’s hold that thought. As for you—” I turned to Lionelli. “Stick around the Delores in case Grimes tries the back door.”

  Lionelli nodded.

  I took a breath. “O.K. I guess that’s everything.”

  “You have a gun?” Lurman asked me.

  “Yeah.” I patted my overcoat.

  The two agents started for the door.

  “We’ll be out in a minute,” I said. “I want to talk to Sarah alone.”

  Lurman smiled and Lionelli leered.

  “C’mon, Ed,” Lurman pulled the other one out the door.

  I looked into Sarah’s face. She looked pale, tense, and remarkably pretty in the overhead light.

  “Well,” I said heavily.

  Sarah threw her arms around me and kissed me on the lips.

  “You’ll be O.K.?” I whispered to her.

  “Fine.”

  “And if there’s any trouble?”

  “There won’t be.”

  I swallowed hard. “Then, let’s go.”

  I took her mittened hand and we walked out of the lobby into the snow-filled street. Sturdevant pulled the Chevy up beside the curb and we piled into the back seat. No one said a word as we drove down Reading to Columbia Parkway and out along the river to Kellogg Avenue.

  ******

  Up until ten years ago, Coney Island was a flourishing amusement park set in the lowlands on the north bank of the Ohio. Then money men—some of them local—decided to build a glass-and-plastic Disneyland east of the city. Kings Island went up and old Coney was abandoned, except for the huge pool, which was made into a municipal recreation spot. In the wintertime, the grounds were completely deserted, which was why Sean O’Hara had picked them as a rendezvous point. From the entrance on Kellogg Avenue where Lurman had dropped us off, all Sarah and I could see of the park was a latticework of the wire fencing and the big snowy parking lot in front of it. Now and then, the wind blew the snow away and a huge corner of building appeared through the haze, nosing out like the prow of a ship through a fog, only to be swallowed up again in the storm. The park was still there—all of it that couldn’t be moved or sold or salvaged. The arcades, the malls, the big art deco buildings where the dance bands used to play on hot summer evenings. It made me melancholy to think about those times and oddly fearful, as if Sarah and I were walking through the driving snow into a seedy ghost town, still echoing with the voices of vendors and barkers and the lilt of dance music.

  Sarah was frightened, too. She held my hand tightly in hers. And when the wind roared at us, as we picked our way through the unplowed snow—she leaned against me and squeezed my arm. It was a good two hundred yards up the access road to the lot itself. And it wasn’t until we were almost on top of it that we saw the van, parked against the cyclone fencing that surrounds the main arcade. I looked back over my shoulder, trying to catch sight of Lurman or Sturdevant. They should have had time to park the Chevy in the River Downs lot and to make their way over the picket fence that separates the race track from the Coney complex. But with the snow blowing so hard, I couldn’t see either of them. Just the access road lined with telephone poles and the hillside that fell away on either side of it, dipping down and then back up to Kellogg Avenue. I looked back at the van and caught a whiff of the river, which runs so close behind the amusement park that the whole mall is flooded several times each spring. It smelled rank as death, even in the bitter wind; and it sobered me up immediately. There were only two lights in the lot—big old streetlamps that threw a dim yellow beam on the van and on the snow around it. In the half light, I thought I could see the outline of a man, sitting on the front seat. As we got closer, I could see him more clearly, framed in the front window of the truck.

  Sarah and I stopped about twenty yards from the van. The wind was howling so loudly that I had to shout to make myself heard.

  “I’ll go up.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “I will.”

  I looked around again, but it was hopeless in the snow. I could barely see the Dodge, much less Lurman, Sturdevant, or rangy Lester Grimes.

  “He’s expecting me, Harry,” Sarah shouted over the wind.

  I said, “All right. But I’ll be right behind you.”

  Sarah headed for the truck. She walked quickly up to the driver’s side door, and I watched her peer through the window. Then something happened to her. She fell against the door and I heard her cry out: “Harry!”

  I started to run. From out of nowhere, Lurman and Sturdevant came charging across the lot, their breath hanging in white clouds in front of them.

  “Oh, God!” Sarah was shouting. “Oh, God!”

  I pulled her away from the window and propped her up against the side of the truck. The snow was swirling around us like a swarm of mosquitoes. I swiped at my eyes and peered through the van window. There was a lace work of blood on the glass, like the web of some red and deadly spider.

  “Jesus,” I whispered.

  Lurman came up beside me.

  “O’Hara?” he said.

  “He’s inside.”

  Lurman leaned over my shoulder and looked into the cab. He had an ugly, eager look on his all-American face. He was in his element and I realized, as I sank away from the window and down to where Sarah was huddled in the snow, how far out of my own I had drifted. The only thing I could think of was getting the girl back to the safety of the apartment.

  “Sarah,” I said to her. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  She didn’t move. The snow had covered her long auburn hair—she was wimpled with it. I pulled her to her feet and her flesh redounded against mine like an opposing force.

  “My fault,” she said in a terrifying voice.

  I shook her hard and said, “This is not your fault. You hear me? Not your fault.”

  She looked at me almost piteously, as if there was something fundamental that I had failed to comprehend. “You don’t know,” she said in that same ghastly voice. “You don’t know. You don’t know.”

  “Get her out of here!” Lurman shouted against the wind. “Take them out of here, Sturdevant!�
�

  Sturdevant bounded ahead of us, up the access road. Sarah continued to stare at me with that same mixture of terror and pity, then she looked back over her shoulder at the van. I jerked her forward. Sturdevant had made fifty yards on us and was tramping, ankle-deep in snow, in the tire tracks that O’Hara’s van had made.

  I saw him look back at us—his hand raised as if he were about to cry out. And then there was an enormous explosion. A white hot flash of light that shook Sarah and me like a gust of wind and sent us tumbling backward into the snow drifts. Hard clods of dirt rained down on us, sinking into the snow with a quick, sucking sound and peppering the van roof like hailstones. A thin, feculent cloud of smoke drifted across the snowy lot. Stunned, I worked my way to my knees and looked back at the spot where Sturdevant had been standing. A ragged hole, like the hole left when a tree trunk is blasted from the ground, had been gashed in the earth.

  “What happened?” I said aloud. I could hear the hysteria in my voice. I looked down at Sarah. She wasn’t moving. I leaned over and turned her face-up in the snow. There was a blood-bruise on her forehead and her eyes were rolled back in their sockets.

  “Sarah!” I shouted. “Sarah!”

  I ripped off a glove and worked my hand beneath her coat. My skin was so cold I couldn’t feel a thing. I pulled the hand back out and rubbed her face with snow. Her lips quivered, as if she were trying to wet them, and she moved her head slightly from side to side. “Don’t die on me!” I shouted at her. She started to speak, but a trickle of blood stopped her voice. I tried to clear her mouth—to make sure she hadn’t swallowed her tongue or bitten it in two. But my hands were too numb and clumsy in the cold. So I wrapped her up in my coat and held her tight until I could hear sirens screaming down Kellogg. A minute later, a hook-and-ladder truck turned onto the access road. Thank God, I thought.

  As the fire engine started toward us, Lurman bolted from behind the Dodge and ran, pigeon-toed, across the lot. He stopped about five yards from where Sarah and I were lying and screamed: “Stop! Stop!” The headlights lit the swatch of ground around Sarah and me and around Lurman, who was prancing in the snow, as if he could hold the truck back by main force. When the engine was about a hundred and fifty yards from us, Lurman stopped waving and dove to the ground.

  “Get down!” I heard him yell.

  I threw myself on top of Sarah and, head bowed, watched the fire engine rumble inexorably up the road through the slow-motion curtain of drifting snow. It was less than a hundred yards away when I realized what was about to happen. And I screamed, “Stop!” although I knew the driver wouldn’t hear me.

  When one of the massive tires tripped the mines, there was a second flash and repercussion. The cab and front section of the fire engine were actually lifted off the roadbed. And for a second, in midair, the truck looked like a horse rearing on its hind legs. Then it came down with the sounds of a building being struck with a demolition ball—a dull, heart-breaking thud, the crinkling of shattered glass, and the crackle of pipes snapping. The truck turned on its side; then a second explosion rippled through it. The oxygen tanks and the gasoline tank went up in a terrific flash that sent flames towering into the darkness. In the red glow I could see the body of one of the firemen, hanging like a twisted kite from the telephone wires.

  “My God,” I said.

  Lurman got slowly to his feet. His glasses had been snapped and one temple was still dangling from his right ear. “Don’t move around!” he called out. “The bastard mined the lot. There may be other charges around us.”

  “I’ve got to get Sarah to a hospital!” I shouted back at him.

  “I’m telling you he mined the whole fucking lot!” Lurman yelled. “Didn’t you see what happened to Sturdevant! Just stay where you are until the police get to you.”

  I cradled Sarah in my arms. She was still unconscious; and in the eerie light cast by the blazing truck, she looked pale as death.

  18

  ON THE way to the hospital she recovered consciousness for long enough to look around her with surprise. At the walls of the ambulance. At the black kid who was holding an oxygen mask to her mouth and whispering sweetly, “Don’t move, miss. Don’t move.” And finally, at me.

  I said, “It’s all right, Sarah. You’re on the way to the hospital now.”

  By the time we pulled up in front of the emergency room door at Christ’s, she was unconscious again. I helped the paramedics get her out of the rear doors and walked beside them through the crowd of white-helmeted police into the emergency room, where a team of doctors took over. I watched them wheel her into a surgery, then the room expanded and there were dozens of people around me—young, harried-looking nurses, interns in their blue hospital play suits, cops of all kinds and jurisdictions and, behind them in the waiting room, the throng of concerned relatives and relations to whom I belonged.

  I wandered out to join them, sat down, suddenly exhausted and vaguely conscious that my clothes were wet and bloody from Sarah and the red mist that Sturdevant had become. They looked me over and fell quiet, except for the ones who were crying and the sleepy children stumbling between the plastic chairs. Someone said, “He’s one of the men who were trapped in the explosion.” It passed quickly through the room that the bloody man by the door had been in the explosion on the river. I could see that a few of them wanted to talk—the ones who were curious without shame and the ones whose husbands had manned that fire truck. I ignored them and tried to fight off the lethargy that had come over me as soon as I sat down. A familiar heaviness in all my limbs, like the heaviness of sleep but duller and irresistible.

  I sat there for what felt like hours, unable to move or to think. Waiting for someone to tell me what had happened to Sarah. No one came. After awhile, I got off the chair and walked back out to the nurse’s station by the door. The pretty young girl behind the desk eyed me with alarm.

  “Where did you come from, sir?” she said. “The doctor will be right with you.”

  “Where’s Sarah Lovingwell? The girl I came in with?”

  “Oh, you’re Mr. Stoner,” she said, looking relieved. “For a moment I didn’t know who you were.” She was new at her job, I could see that. Just barely out of candy stripes. A youngster who took her charge seriously. “Your friend’s still in surgery.”

  “How long has she been in?” I said with dull terror. My body was beginning to work again. Not fully, yet. Not sharply enough to feel the anguish that part of me knew was there beneath the fatigue.

  “Since they brought you in at twelve,” she said weakly.

  I tried not to think what that could mean. She was the wrong one to ask anyway. Telling me that much had wounded her. I needed one of the old hands. Or one of the residents whose idea of honesty was a brusque indifference to other people’s pain. I needed someone who would tell me the truth and not care. I didn’t want to see anyone grieving.

  “Can I get coffee around here?” I asked her.

  “Downstairs,” she said. “In the lounge.”

  I took the stairs instead of the elevator—to make my legs move and my heart pound again. With each step I felt stronger and with each step the anger and fear became harder to contain. I made myself hold it in, pitting my muscles against my gut, parading beside the row of vending machines for above ten minutes. Up and back, sipping coffee that tasted of cardboard and cocoa and telling myself it was going to be all right.

  After a time I walked into the lounge itself. A few interns were sitting at the tables—big white lily pads sunk into the concrete floor. Overhead the fixtures dangled in weird geometries, like box kites without their paper skins.

  Ten minutes went by, then Lurman entered the room and walked over to the table where I was sitting. “I’ve been over at General,” he said. “After we left, Grimes paid your apartment a visit. We think he was planning to booby-trap it the way he booby-trapped the lot.”

  “What about Lionelli?”

  Lurman sat back in his chair and shook his h
ead. “He’s dead, Harry. Grimes blew him away with a shotgun. Right out on Burnet Avenue.”

  “Sweet Jesus,” I said.

  “Poor bastards. This whole damn thing’s been a fuck-up from start to finish,” Lurman said bitterly. “You know, in the old days they say agents used to duck out of banks during robberies, just so they wouldn’t screw up at that kind of high-paced game.” He shook his head again. “Can you imagine what the Bureau’s going to say about tonight?”

  “Can you imagine how little I care?”

  He blushed. “I’m sorry. It’s just been a bad day. How’s Sarah doing?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She’s been in surgery for two hours.”

  “It hasn’t been a good day,” he said again.

  For a moment there didn’t seem to be anything more either of us could say. Two of his partners were dead. Sarah was lying on an operating table somewhere above us. And we had survived to share the guilts that survivors share. And one thing else—the coruscating anger that I’d been holding inside since I’d seen her wheeled into that surgery.