I played out a few circuits with the Toyota glued to my rear fender, reaching eighty on the straight, swerving around the occasional parked car.
On the third lap, I put the tunnel in my sights and aimed.
I was doing sixty when I hit the lip of the ramp leading down to the tunnel. Too fast and I would fly into the roof of the underpass, too slow and I would clog up in the sand drifts.
“What the f . . . ,”I heard Paula scream in disbelief.
The futility of ducking was obvious to me, but that didn’t stop the reflex action. The steering wheel pressed harshly into my forehead as the car turned dark. But the roof was still on.
I braked.
I heard a thunderous smash and thought for a moment that the road was going to collapse on top of us.
Raising my head, I turned to look behind us. Paula was doing the same. Even Miranda, spaced-out and sporting a livid red bruise on her left cheek, seemed mesmerized by the sight. A giant Toyota snout poked into the entrance of the tunnel, headlights still on, engine roaring. Carlstein’s car was juddering like a harpooned whale, caught by the pillars halfway along the car, pinioned against the ceiling of the underpass.
The heads of the two kids poked out, wide-eyed, from under the coat.
I got out of the car and walked back down the tunnel. I didn’t know quite what to expect, quite what I wanted.
The noise. I wanted the hideous noise to stop.
The windshield frame was ripped away, exposing the interior, like it was a 3D graphic design, cut away to maximize the impact of the interior layout.
Carlstein was slumped against the wheel, smothered by the airbag.
I went around to the side of the vehicle and reached in to find the ignition key. I fumbled around the steering column, but his arm was in the way. I didn’t want to touch bare flesh, so I withdrew and pushed gently at the white cotton shirt to try and separate the body from the steering column.
Staggering back, I clamped my hand against my mouth.
Blood spurted over Carlstein’s shoulders and down his shirt front.
He no longer had a head.
Edging along the side of the car, I looked on the rear seat. I could see his face in a tangle of metal, staring at me in surprise, his ponytail as pert as a palm tree.
For an instant, I embraced a vision of Carlstein, a Zen-like sense that I was a collection of molecules in a universe of molecules, that Carlstein was still a collection of molecules, just that some of them were occupying a different position in space from a few moments earlier. And that if space and time were illusory, then nothing really had changed: Carlstein was still Carlstein. He was behind the windshield of a Toyota or a two-way mirror watching McIntyre forcing Paula toviolate herself. Still exerting, controlling, manipulating, potent as ever to violate and invade.
A less metaphysical thought struck me: All this wasn’t just about Non-Resident Indians and money laundering. It couldn’t be. The Gemini Club wasn’t a League of Gentlemen looking to subsidize the wine tab. There had to be a monstrous baseness at its heart.
With that thought I turned to more practical and immediate issues.
When I moved to switch off the Toyota’s engine, it occurred to me that getting the Ford out of the tunnel wasn’t a simple matter of driving forward. Within yards we’d be on the beach in three feet of sand, immovable.
That meant reversing the Toyota, dealing with Carlstein’s torso.
I ripped the airbag from its mooring and reached across to unlock the seat belt still slung over his shoulder and across his chest. I felt the blood soak into my own clothes. The belt itself was saturated. I glanced at his neck. Apart from the blood, it looked like a piece of complex electrical equipment undergoing a major overhaul on a workbench.
I pushed the body so it lay awkwardly over the armrest and onto the passenger seat, and then perched myself on the edge of the driver’s seat. Squeezing my leg into the cavity under the steering column, I slid the transmission into reverse and pressed the accelerator. The engine screamed and there was the abrasive shriek of metal on stone before the Toyota sprang from the tunnel’s clutches. I straightened the wheel and the car started to drift up the ramp.
Could we be seen from the road?
It was academic; we just had to get out of there.
I allowed the car to go twenty feet or so before braking and turning off the engine.
Paula and Miranda stood in front of the Ford. Miranda was shaking violently, knuckles white in the headlights as she clutched at the coat that was draped around her shoulders.
The bridge rumbled as a car went over it. Paula and I held our breath, and Miranda started to groan.
The car carried on toward Bayville.
FORTY-SIX
We needed a haven, a refuge. To regroup and consolidate. Do things real humans do: eat, pee, rest. And then?
Go to Paula’s? No way. I didn’t want to sleep with the fishes.
I looked in the mirror; nothing more threatening than a UPS truck.
Nobody said anything, not even to curse the stink in the car.
I was worried about Miranda, she looked pretty sick.
Pablo’s wife. Julia. A nurse, Pablo had said.
He’d be asleep.
I tried the cell phone. Dead. The fall to the floor had crippled it, ruined the battery maybe.
It was a risk, but I pulled up at a gas station to use a pay phone.
I dialed Pablo’s number.
“Si.”He obviously dreamed in Spanish.
“Carlstein’s dead,” I said.
“Sheesh. You kill him?” There was a loud crack, the phone falling to floor maybe. “Don’t answer that.” He sounded wide awake now.
“No, Pablo, I didn’t kill him.” It was a bridge that had killed him.“But I’ve got some sick people here. I need to come to your place. Perhaps Julia can take a look and see whether we need to go to the emergency room.”
“There’s a limit to what I can do, Fin,” Pablo moaned.
“Nothing unethical, Pablo. I’ll only pressure you within the envelope of what’s okay and it’s hardly unethical to take in Miranda Carlson and her kids, is it? Just for a few hours . . .”
“Fuck. You didn’t say it was her.”
“Well, it is. Now just give me your address.”
He moaned some more and then told me.
I then called Carol’s number in Scarsdale. Voicemail. Maybe she wasn’t there yet, perhaps she was but was sleeping—she’d said that was a possibility. At least Carlstein couldn’t get to her.
But, with the cell phone out of commission, she couldn’t call me.
I left a short message: We’re okay, will call later, love you.
“We’re going to Tochera’s house,” I said to Paula on returning to the car. “I tried Carol. No answer.”
“Another JJ victim,” Miranda murmured.
“I thought I was the villain of the piece,” I said.
“Why did you pick me up? The kids were asleep and I was . . .” Her voiced trailed into nothing.
“We didn’t come to find you, but we found you,” I said. “You were sick, needed help. I knew we couldn’t just leave you there.”
She leaned forward, the warm cloud of her acid breath on my neck. “Maybe you knew more than you knew.”
I sensed her press back into her seat.
She continued, as if we didn’t exist. “For eight years JJ kept me in a doll’s house,” she said. “The world wasn’t supposed to crash into our lives. Not the real world. Everything was supposed to be perfect on Park Avenue.”
Park Avenue? What about the aerie on Central Park West—it must have been the bachelor pad, for nights when he wasn’t married. I wondered if Miranda even knew of its existence. The wife is always the last to know.
In the rearview mirror, I could see her pull the kids toward her. They were quiet now, subdued.
“And then you and that car,” she said.
“You don’t seriously think I owned tha
t car?” I tried to submerge the anger I felt, tried to occupy her place for a moment: a mother, a widow, something—Christ knew what—in Carlstein’s life. A body self-evidently wracked by bone-rotting weariness.
“We were like something out of a magazine,” she said. “I didn’t really understand what he did, except that he was the best. You know, the dumb trophy wife thing. And I sure as hell didn’t know about the drugs.” She laughed. “Or about Carol Amen. There were others; I always knew. You can just tell. But he kept them out of our lives; he even used to get mad if he heard someone had split up because of another woman. He used to shout about it and say they must be crazy.” She paused. “But Carol Amen. Conrad said she was different, not one of JJ’s casual fucks.”
I felt a vicious stab at the back of my head, a finger. “You were the only one who managed it.”
“Managed what?” I asked cautiously.
“To take something from him that he really wanted.”
Except that I hadn’t. I’d been Carol’s ruse, her tunnel out of Camp JJ. I’d only taken her after JJ was dead.
Miranda was quiet for a while. I could see her stroking the children’s hair as her eyes flickered blankly across the passing scenery.
“And despite everything he was supposed to have, he left us nothing,” she said suddenly.
“What happened to it?” I asked. “He was rich, super rich.”
“It’s off the map,” Miranda said. “In a trust. Everything he had is in the trust. And I’m not a beneficiary. Nor are the kids. Some bastard attorney in the Antilles told me I wasn’t an object of the trust.” She gulped hard. For a moment I thought she was going to throw up again.
“Object,” she managed. “What kind of word is that for hisfamily? Object?Jesus.”
“Is the trust called Huxtable?” I asked.
Miranda groaned like I’d hit her. “Yes.”
JJ had wrapped his life up and pushed it out to sea. Or someone had done it for him. Carlstein? The Geminis?
“They wanted me out of the house,” Miranda said. “They told me I could stay a couple weeks. Big of them. But Conrad showed up. I didn’t know that JJ even had a brother until the day before the funeral. That’s when I learned the real family name. Anyway, he said he was going to take us in.”
I wondered if she knew that Carlstein’s house had been JJ’s or, rather, Huxtable’s. I wondered if she knew that Carol had been privy to the existence of a brother, to the existence of a prior name, that she’d known about all that long before Miranda.
Miranda let her window down and turned her face into the wind.
After a while, she pulled back her head and closed the window. “Conrad was good to us. For a while I thought he was just a harmless old hippy, nothing like JJ. But I soon learned that he was all about manipulation: first JJ, then me. And then I found him in the study with the kids, pointing at the pictures, explaining them. He laughed at my anger, my fear. He seemed so confident that he could control me with that brain of his, and if not that, those pills he made me take.”
Her voice merged into a moan.
Then I felt her breath again on my neck.
“But you still occupy a piece of my hell,” Miranda’s whispered. “Don’t think I don’t think that. But maybe the car wasn’t yours. Maybe.” She paused and then added: “But you got me out ofthatplace.”
In the mirror, I saw her turn her attention away from me and snuggle up to the kids.
I glanced at the clump of e-mails on the passenger seat.
Numbers. What was in there? A weapon? Something with which to save myself and extract a price? And I owed so many people, more people than I was able to think about. I owed it to them to breathe life into these dead numbers.
FORTY-SEVEN
Pablo Tochera lived in an ivy-clad four-story brownstone on Sixty-second between Madison and Lexington Avenue. Whatever McIntyre felt about tokenism, he had obviously been prepared to pay well for it.
Julia, Pablo’s wife, opened the front door, smiling more out of duty than pleasure, I sensed, and after strained introductions, led us through a hallway hung with classical prints of billowy birds of paradise, into a white and canary yellow painted oak kitchen where she asked us to sit at a large stripped pine table.
Miranda sat with both children on her lap, one on each leg. Her eyes were closed and she rocked gently.
Julia studied the kids for a moment, asked them their names, and then sat down herself. She looked like she had gotten used to sitting at the head of the household table, this statuesque Puerto Rican with black hair that could have made it to the floor without a split end if she’d let it grow that far. As it was, the hair maintained its lustrous shape to just below her shoulder blades.
“Hey, guys, how you doing?” Pablo shot a nervous glance at Julia and came and sat next to me.
Julia got up. “I’m going to take this lady and her children upstairs.” Her voice was softer than I’d expected. Professional but compassionate. It would be easy to be scared of her, but easy to respect and like her too.
Pablo nodded. “Sure, hon.”
Julia gently pried the little girl from Miranda’s arm. “Come on, Sarah. You, me, Mommy, and Ray are going someplace nice. We’re going to have some fun and let these deadbeats do their thing down here.” She kissed the girl on the nose. “Okay, sweetie?”
Sarah clung onto her and looked at her mother for confirmation. Miranda nodded weakly.
“Sure,” Sarah said and clung even tighter.
Miranda, with Ray sitting upright in her arm, obediently followed Julia out of the room.
“Cars,” wailed Ray.
Pablo picked up the shoebox. “This?”
Ray nodded firmly.
“I’d like to freshen up,” Paula said.
“Sure,” Pablo said. “Up the stairs, second left. Julia will be in there. Ask her to get you towels and stuff. Find you a bed maybe, if you want one.”
“Paula,” I said. “You reckon you can stay awake a while? Pablo’s going to need your help.”
She smiled. “It’s office hours; why not? Just so long as nobody messes with my lunch break.”
“Thanks.” I hoped that my face conveyed a prayer just answered.
I turned to Pablo. “You got a computer here? One with a modem?”
“Wiseguy. Being home doesn’t mean I stop working. I’ve got a modem wire stuck up my ass when I sleep.”
“I want you to set up two Websites for me,” I said. “Give the first any domain name you want. Something boring like . . .” I tried to think of something that wouldn’t attract attention or looked as if it led into a pornographic site.
I’d been thinking about where to take this. Thinking, too much thinking . . .
“Numberland,” I decided.
“What’s all this for?” Pablo asked. “I don’t know how to set up a Website.”
“Paula does.”
Pablo looked worried.
“It’s not unethical. I promise,” I said, putting my arm around his shoulder.
“Thanks, Fin. I feel better already. And the second site?”
“Kipgem.” It was unlikely that the name was already taken. “All I want on it is a header saying:In Black and Whiteby Rudyard Kipling. Then underneath, in block capitals, put an instruction to read the “Gemini” story to figure out the numbers.”
“You’re a fucking piece of work, you know that?”
I took a scrunched-up wad of paper out of my pocket. “I’ll need copies, Pablo.” The e-mails. I hung on to Ernie’s letter and handed the rest to Pablo.
“These are for the Numberland Website,” I said. “List out the numbers exactly as they appear in the e-mails. Watch it, there are some letters of the alphabet and some dots. Make sure you transcribe them exactly.”
“What do they mean?”
“I don’t know yet,” I said. “But I will.” I needed a quiet space to do my crossword puzzle. There was a big prize for this one.
I sat at a smal
l desk in a guest room. The bed looked tempting, but I had work to do.
The walls were covered with pictures of sailboats. They traced Pablo’s ascent up the corporate ladder. A few dinghies. Pablo, younger, thinner, in orange with a dumb hat at a rakish angle. Julia smiling grimly, like she felt seasick.
Then a small cruiser. Pablo more serious, attired in a more affluent outfit. Not so happy, perhaps, not so carefree.
Then a mother of a motor launch, the nameJulia Iin swirly italicson its prow. First of many more? No people in this picture. All boat.
The spare room had gone the way of most spare rooms—it was a dumping ground for stuff that the Tocheras couldn’t quite bring themselves to discard or that they felt guilty about not using. Instead of idle exercise bikes and painting easels, this room contained flotsam from Pablo’s sailing era. He’d graduated from sail to steam, but nostalgia still gripped him in the shape of old ropes, cleats, foul weather gear, tarps, a precomputer age compass, and what looked like some distress flares. I was prepared to bet that Julia gave him grief about the mess.
But it was a good room to work in.
I fanned out the e-mails in front of me to get an impressionistic feel of their visual texture. I laid my hard-won copy ofIn Black and Whitenext to them, opened at the “Gemini” story. I had a sharp pencil and a sheaf of unlined paper.
Then I took Ernie’s letter. There was an orderliness to the e-mails, the discipline of typeface. But Ernie’s letter . . . scratchy, angry, inscrutable, yet possibly the most important.
I’d start with Ernie’s scrawl.
The trick, I reckoned, was to make a few general assumptions and then apply them. First off, the code had to be readily applicable; in other words, you wouldn’t need anything other than the “Gemini” story to crack a message, and that meant no rulebook; the players had to be able to commit the rules of the game to memory. And the players had to be able to play the game in most surroundings, however uncomfortable. There was no point in sending a message if the recipient needed a lab furnished with an Enigma machine to understand it. There was no point either, if the recipient would be dribbling in an old folks home by the time he’d figured it out.
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