Walls of Silence

by Walls Of Silence Free(Lit)

  “I can’t stop you thinking what you think,” Pablo said.

  “And I also think that Terry pricked your conscience, told you some home truths about yourself, held up a mirror to you, the one with pro-bono Pablo on it, the one with the witty, self-effacing, basically decent Pablo etched into it. And you came to Kennedy Airport to bail me out. But now Terry’s gone, leaving nobody to prick your conscience again. I’ll be squashed and you’ll be on the letterhead.Que sera.But let me tell you something, Pablo. Are you listening hard?”

  “I’m about to hang up.”

  “Give me a minute and then you can do what you want. The only people who can clear me quickly, who don’t need depositions and forensics and whatnot, are an anonymous coterie of Non-Resident Indians and the members of the Gemini Club. I’m in no position to square up to any NRIs; I wouldn’t know one if he came up to me and screamed ‘Badla’ in my ear. So that leaves the Club. At the risk of straying into the realms of melodrama, Pablo, I’m telling you that I’m gunning for them, McIntyre included. Directly or indirectly, Gemini was the instrument of my parents’ deaths and now they want to kill me and bury my reputation with the body.”

  There was a rustle on the line. Static? Or the click you’re . . .

  “You still there?”

  “By a thread, guy.”

  “So, I intend to find something that will persuade them to exonerate me, to short-circuit the process, before Manelli catches up with me or the demented relative of one of the FDR victims does more than paint the walls red or send hate mail.”

  “You said that these people want to kill you,” Pablo countered quickly. “So aren’t your priorities a little screwy talking about exoneration? Exoneration isn’t worth much if you’re dead.”

  Exoneration was priceless. And yet Pablo was right, but for another reason.

  “Exoneration isn’t enough,” I said. “A price must be exacted for what these people have done. And I want to be alive to see it paid.” I flicked a glance at Paula. She was owed a big debt by McIntyre too. Her eyes stayed fixed on the road ahead, her face locked in a concentration disproportionate to the perils that the driving conditions represented.

  “From where I’m sitting it looks like an ambitious agenda you’ve set yourself,” Pablo said.

  It didn’t look like a pushover from the passenger seat of Paula’s car either. “What option do I have: Turn myself in? I’ll either be in jail or dead and, in a few years time, someone might scribble a corrigendum to my headstone saying—‘Sorry, wrong guy.’ ”

  Pablo tutted impatiently. “Time-out. What’s all this to me? Is it some messianic bullshit: If you’re not with me you’re against me, as you fuck off into your conspiracy theory sunset? Or are you really threatening to bring me down with the others, is that the real point?”

  People always said that, didn’t they?Are you threatening me, are you threatening me?As if an answer in the affirmative always meant that all bets were off. I didn’t want to threaten Pablo. IlikedPablo. Even so, there was some truth in what he was saying, the veil was thin. Nevertheless, I liked to think of it more as a dispassionate analysis of one prong on the fork of the future rather than a threat.

  “If it is a threat,” I said, “according to your own analysis, it’s pretty impotent.”

  “What the hell do you want from me?”

  “Just to be yourself, be ethical, be the Pablo as painted by Terry. And not to hoard anything that might help save me.”

  Pablo snorted. “McIntyre keeps his files and data locked up too tight for me to have anything to hoard.”

  I hoped that Conrad Carlstein wasn’t quite so security conscious.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’m not asking you to break the lock on McIntyre’s five-year diary or bug his phone.”

  “And what are you going to do?”

  Decode a letter from a dead man and break into the house of a hippy in Oyster Bay.

  “I wouldn’t want to compromise your ethical position by telling you.”

  “Fuckin’ Brit.”

  “I’ll call you later,” I said.

  “Missing you already,” Pablo said gloomily.

  As I cut the phone, the car juddered as we crossed some railroad tracks.

  “Long Island Railroad,” Paula said, as if the end of my call with Pablo was a cue to start a commentary on the passing landmarks.

  “So what do you think?” I said.

  “About what?”

  “About my conversation.”

  “Client-attorney privilege, I didn’t listen in. Anyway, I could only hear one half of it.”

  I pressed hard against the headrest and shut my eyes. All I’d needed to achieve was a sporting chance that Pablo didn’t turncoat and run to McIntyre. And I wasn’t convinced I’d managed even that.

  I keyed in the number of St. Cecilia’s and asked to speak with Carol. Five minutes marooned on hold in their telephone system suggested that calls to Carol weren’t going to get through.

  Deacon Avenue was a respectable road of pleasant white clapboard houses. Not rich but solvent: Ford Galaxys in the driveways, the odd Corvette, a boat or two on trailers. The front lawns were small but manicured.

  Paula eased the car to a halt at the end of the short street.

  “We’ve passed my house,” Paula said. “I wanted to check therewere no visitors parked outside. Nobody’s supposed to know about this place, but you never know. Stay here while I make sure the inside’s clear and I’ll come back to get you. If I’m running like an idiot, get in the driver’s seat and have the engine running.”

  “Be careful,” I said as she got out of the car.

  She leaned through the open window and smiled. “If I were careful I wouldn’t be with you, honey.”

  I watched her walk to around the halfway point of Deacon Avenue, before swinging into a driveway marked by a neat blue mailbox topped by a little plastic man set to crank the handle of a weathervane.

  I tried to think about my next move, but was distracted by the throb in my hip and the raw pain of the burn on my back against a cotton shirt sopped with sweat.

  The image that sporadically and indistinctly surfaced was that of Carlstein as a kind of hub, the unmoving center of the wheel that was the Gemini Club. While the others flitted around the world in their capacity as international movers and shakers, Carlstein stayed home, tending the fire, generating e-mail directives. Had that been his role at Oxford? No e-mail then, of course. As they sipped sherry and dangled muffins over the fire, had he said to them in turn: “When you grow up you’ll do such and such and when my little brother gets out of diapers I’ll arrange for him to be a Harvard MBA and have him appointed top banker and he will be our stooge. Then they’ll invent e-mail—so don’t expect me to travel, I’ll work from home.”

  I had to get into his world; he would never come to mine except to destroy it.

  I looked at my watch. Twenty minutes had passed. Strange; it had felt like time was as still as the man on the mailbox. I shook myself out of my stupor. Paula should have been back. Give it another minute?

  No. She should have been back by now.

  Boy Scout stealthcraft told me to go around the back of the house first: down the driveway and into a backyard of immaculate flower beds bordering a small patch of grass, as smooth as AstroTurf and with a pond at its center, fed by a concrete toddler endlessly pouring water from a small barrel. A paperback, bookmarked halfwaythrough, lay in a deck chair facing the pond. I imagined Paula sitting there, reading, dozing, lifting her head from time to time to admire her nibble of paradise.

  Edging along the back of the house I stopped to peer through a window. A patchwork of light and shadow, a display made uneven by the partial blocking effect of sparse trees on the rear boundary of the yard and the now descending sun. A kitchen counter, a table half in murk, a terracotta clock on the wall, and deeper into the house, light showing through from a front room. But no people, no noise.

  I moved to the concrete stoop le
ading up to the back door, which I guessed led straight into the kitchen. The concrete was stained wet, the grass around its base soggy. It hadn’t been raining and, while I imagined Paula as house-proud, even I didn’t suppose that she would have swabbed the kitchen floor and thrown the slops out back before she would let me into the house.

  I tried the door handle. It squeaked maddeningly but the door opened easily enough and I found myself in a kitchen, paneled in light American oak, homey and efficient. There was a wickerwork bowl on the counter next to the door brimming with keys and surplus fridge magnets, a tin of lubricating oil—presumably to fix the squeaky door hinge next to it, and a bowl of fruit on the shadowed section of the kitchen table; otherwise little else cluttering the surfaces, everything apparently tucked neatly into drawers and cupboards.

  The terracotta clock ticked; there was no other sound.

  But there was something in the air, a tang.

  There was also something on the floor, a slick of water. The source of the smell?

  The veneer of outward calm began to peel away.

  Between the kitchen and the front room was a dividing wall about waist height and on it I could see shards of glass point viciously upward like some cruel and redundant security measure. Over some of the shards hung strips of glossy green. Seaweed?

  I moved over to the dividing wall and looked into the room beyond.

  And there she was. Paula kneeling, a sodden pile of multicolored offal-like material in front of her. But it wasn’t offal; in the moment that it tookfor me to recognize Paula, I’d also divined much else about the scenario.

  It was a pile of small fish, the tropical kind, a mound of golds, blues, and greens flecked through with silver. The dividing wall was three feet wide and along its length lay grit, weed, fishy toys, a rock pool or two sporting lifeless rainbows on their surface.

  It had been the superstructure for what must have been a spectacular floor-to-ceiling aquarium. But now its residents formed a gelatinous pyramid on Paula’s swampy carpet.

  A shudder passed down Paula’s back like a wave.

  “I thought I was safe here,” she murmured.

  I walked out of the kitchen, down the hall, and entered the front room through the door. Crossing the carpet toward Paula, an unpleasant squelch accompanied each step. Kneeling beside her I placed an arm over her shoulder.

  “I should never have got you embroiled in this,” I said.

  She held one of the fish in her outstretched palm. “Who did this?” An inch of faded blue, a streak of yellow, a dull dead fishy eye. “Was it McIntyre? Did he find out somehow, have us followed?”

  Didn’t Ernie once say that McIntyre was like a haddock with a beard? Did haddock prey on little fish?

  I looked up and saw a parade of fish corpses tacked to the wall below an Ansel Adams print of Yosemite. Three rows of five, like the “kill” decals on a fighter plane.

  Fifteen fish. Fifteen dead names on my apartment wall, on Carol’s wall.

  “No,” I said. “It wasn’t McIntyre. It was someone who is very angry about what happened on the FDR and wants to hurt me and anyone connected with me.” It was also someone who seemed well able to trace people and get into their homes.

  Paula got up and started to pull at one of the tacks on the wall to release a harpooned fish. When it was free she held it out to me.

  “Colisa Sota,” she said quietly. “Turquoise stripes on an orange background, like a kooky thumbprint. Pretty, so pretty. An underwater painting.” She laid it gently on top of the mound, the fish pyre. “Now look.”

  “I knew every fish in the tank: the Poecilla, the Xiphophorus, theBotia. With my eyes shut I can still see their colors, their shapes, the little telltale movements and flicks that singled them out, differentiated them. I knew what and how they ate, their reproductive cycles, their little personalities. Some might think me crazy, but I knew them as individuals, creatures each with their own special way of doing things.”

  I didn’t think her crazy. The fishermen of Versova had their dignity; why not the fish woman of Deacon Avenue?

  For five years I hadn’t been aware of where she lived or that she was mother to a teeming subaqueous family. The only inkling I’d had, was one time when Paula expressed satisfaction with a plate of mahi-mahi at a fish restaurant down in South Street Seaport.

  “I never knew,” I said. “They must have been beautiful.”

  She shrugged. “I can get some more. You can order them off the Internet these days.”

  Poking me in the ribs, she added: “And I don’t care how hurt you are, you can still help clear up this mess.”

  Despite the defiant pose, I knew that a part of her had been hooked, clubbed, and gutted along with her family. An irreplaceable part of her.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Paula hadn’t been kidding. An hour later, I was just starting to peel away a dozen or so towels from the front room carpet, a fresh plump pile ready to take their place. The vengeful victims of the FDR weren’t going to get between Paula and a dry floor.

  The broken glass was gone, the weed and grit and other aquarium paraphernalia in black trash bags. The fish disposed of—Paula wouldn’t say how or where.

  Only the open space between the kitchen and the front room testified to a more profound crevasse that had opened up in Paula’s life.

  I knew we probably shouldn’t be hanging around like this. There was someone out there with a map and a pin stuck through the middle of Paula’s house. They might want to make a return visit. But the cleanup was important, symbolically so. It had to be done. Just like sending my mother into the Arabian Sea. Everything else would have to wait.

  “Fin.” It was Paula. I hadn’t heard her come into the room.

  “That’s enough housework,” she said. “We should get out of here now. What do you plan on doing?”

  “JJ Carlson’s brother, Conrad Carlstein. I’m going to his house, see what I can find.”

  “What if he’s home?” Paula asked.

  As always, Paula had asked the key question.

  “Get him out. Somehow.”

  “Maybe I can help, get him out, that is. Where’s he live?”

  “Oyster Bay, some small beach house owned by JJ. Except, of course, JJ didn’t own anything. And, no, Paula. You’re not coming—we have to put plenty of fresh air between you and this situation. That means we must go our separate ways. You’ve done more than enough.”

  “A beach house in the shadow of its big daddy on the hill,” Paula said, almost a chant, her eyes shut, her lips pursed in an angry pain, her body swaying, swaying to the memory of something rotten.

  Carol had said nothing of a large house nearby; only that it lay beyond a yacht club on Center Island, an isthmus crooking its coastline like a scooping hand to form Oyster Bay.

  But I knew that someone else had just broken into Paula’s life, someone who had sidestepped Paula’s real estate, her chattels, left her fish alone. He had gone straight for Paula’s body and soul.

  “The big house,” I said. “Is that where McIntyre attacked you?”

  “I’m coming with you,” she said.

  “Surely . . .”

  “What were you intending to use as wheels?” Paula cut in waspishly. “Who was going to direct you? Or were you set on the idea of discovering just how little public transportation there is on this island?”

  Paula and I didn’t look like the kind of couple who would be toting a hammer, flashlight, newspaper, and jar of honey, but when we set out, the Wal-Mart bag on the backseat of the Ford contained all four.

  I’d had little choice but to let Paula come. It was her car. And it was as much her past as my present we were visiting. But I’d insisted she should stay in the car, in the background. She’d merely snorted and observed that I was no John Wayne and she was no blond bimbo, two statements with which it was impossible to disagree.

  She wanted me to drive, she said; she would sit with the map on her lap and listen to soul on
the radio. She would think.

  And so it was, for the first ten or so miles of the journey north on short bland stretches of highway: Southern Parkway, Grand Central, 495. I lost track of them, but Paula would open her eyes at just the right moment, lift her hand languidly, and murmur, “This exit.” Then back to the meditation.

  When we left the roaring gray of parkways and expressways and became immersed in the lush, laid-back greenery unfolding on the North Shore, my cell phone rang.

  “Harley showed me the letter.” Carol’s voice was firm. “He breached the rather lax security and intercepted my mail. For my own good, he said.”

  “You okay?” I asked cautiously.

  “I think Harley hoped that I’d be on life support by now. If he couldn’t have me, then no one could. Something like that.”

  I wondered, momentarily, how Harley was feeling, what he was doing to himself.

  “I didn’t think for a moment that you’d—”

  “Sure,” Carol cut in. “We all say all kinds of stuff in group. It helps to hear yourself say things out loud sometimes, then you realize just how crazy those thoughts are and you can banish them instantly.”

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “Keep busy. I’ve already been busy, made a phone call—besides this one.”

  “Who to?”

  “Conrad Carlstein.”

  What? I was on the way to his place for possibly the most crucial unscheduled appointment of my life and she . . . and she . . . What the fuck did she think she was playing at?

  “There was the small matter of some unfinished business,” she quickly said, perhaps sensing the imminent flurry of incredulous “what-the’s” on my part. “Maybe now it’s time to get some closure on the issue.” She was starting the slope down the other side of her high, the voice quavering slightly as if she was only now coming to realize the enormity of what she was saying.

  “You want to get into Carlstein’s house,” she said.