Rick hesitated a moment. “You never said anything about that.”
“I told the doctor.”
“Is there anything else you can remember? Did he look like he might have been beaten?”
Her eyes searched the ceiling. “It’s been so long. How long has it been, twenty years?”
“Just about. So no blood or other signs that he might have been attacked?”
“No, nothing. Who would attack Len?”
“That’s what I wanted to ask you. Whether he had enemies you might have known about. You said he did business with sketchy people from the old Combat Zone, didn’t you?”
“I don’t know as any of them were violent, really.”
He took a bite of the scone. It was still warm from the oven. Then he almost choked. It was as dry as a mouthful of sand. It took a good slug of coffee to get it down. “Mmm,” he said. “Delicious.”
“Oh, good. It’s my mother’s recipe. Irish soda bread scones. Please help yourself to more. Timothy doesn’t care for them.” She took a dainty bite and apparently had no problem swallowing it.
“I’m good,” he said, and he took another gulp of coffee.
“But some of your father’s clients from the old days—well, I just kept my mouth shut, since it wasn’t my business, but before he started, um, working in the Combat Zone, he had quite a few of what I call the shaggy-haired America-bashers, you know. I imagine some of them might have been dangerous.”
“America-bashers?” He took another long swig of coffee.
She pursed her lips. “Those students who wanted to overthrow the government. With their long hair and their ‘power to the people’ and their demonstrations.” She made a fist and wagged it in the air. “The less said about those clients, the better. Your father and I agreed to disagree.”
“What do you mean, Joan? Were there disagreements? Any threats?”
“Who knows with those people.”
“You don’t remember whether he had any enemies? Did he confide in you about any people he might have been afraid of?”
“I told you, your father didn’t really confide much in me. He had a lot of secrets but not many people he confided in. I don’t know as he had many friends, to tell you the truth.”
That was true, Rick reflected. His father had his work, his clients, and then he’d come home and sit in his study. He seemed to have no social life.
“I don’t think he had a lot of friends,” Rick said. There were none that Rick could think of.
“There was that odd fellow in New Hampshire. He used to call from time to time.”
“New Hampshire?”
“One of those scruffy people. A short name? Kent or Jones? He drove up to New Hampshire a week or so before his stroke. I think he was visiting this friend. Clark?”
“Clarke, right!” Rick said. “Paul Clarke.”
“Clarke. I think he was a friend.”
Rick had a sudden recollection of driving up to New Hampshire when he and Wendy were kids, visiting an old friend of Lenny’s who had a maple syrup farm. Paul Clarke, the name was. He lived in an old farmhouse with a barn. Rick remembered playing with a Victrola with a magnificent horn that was kept in the barn, playing 78 rpm records. Lenny and Paul used to disappear into Paul’s study and have long, deep talks for hours at a time, while Wendy and Rick and their mother explored the house and played in the barn or outside in the snow. Or they’d check out the sugar house where Paul made the syrup. They’d go sledding down a steep hill.
“Do you have his phone number by any chance?”
“It would probably be in the old Rolodex. Let me go down and see if I can dig it up. You help yourself to another scone, why don’t you.”
“I’m still working on this one. I’m trying not to be a pig.”
While she went down to the basement, Rick looked around the kitchen. He noticed a framed needlepoint sampler on the wall that said ERIN GO BRAGH in yellow letters against a green background. The words were surrounded by sprigs of shamrocks. Rick didn’t remember what Erin go Bragh meant, just that it was an Anglicization of some Irish expression. He thought of the “666” shamrocks on the wrist of one of his attackers.
Boston was, in a lot of ways, an Irish town. There were more Asians and Hispanics in Boston, by percentage, but the Irish had dominated Boston for more than a century. They came over in the mid-nineteenth century to escape famine and found themselves an oppressed minority. Old-line Bostonians hired the Irish immigrants as their servants, paying slave wages. The Irish did all the jobs no one else would do, mopping the gutters and scrubbing the laundry and butchering the hogs and taking care of the babies. They could get no other work. Signs in shop windows said NO IRISH NEED APPLY. But by the late nineteenth century the Irish had begun to organize and get elected to political office, and for a hundred years, most of the mayors of Boston were Irishmen.
“Here we go,” Joan said when she returned. “A 603 area code; that’s New Hampshire.” She was carrying a big Rolodex wheel that must have held a thousand cards. The cards looked yellowed. She set it down on the kitchen table, open to a card with “CLARKE, Paul” typed in the typescript of an old manual typewriter. The e’s were filled in. The card had a 603 phone number and a post office box address in Redding, New Hampshire.
“Could I take this?” Rick said.
After a moment’s hesitation, Joan said, sitting down, “I suppose so,” and she detached the card from the wheel and handed it to him.
“Thanks,” he said. “Let me run another name by you. I think he’s the mysterious ‘P’ that Dad was scheduled to have lunch with on the day of his stroke. Alex Pappas?”
She blinked once. “Alex Pappas. Sure.” She looked as if she didn’t want to say anything further.
“You know him?”
She shrugged. “Through your father.”
Strange, he thought, that she never suggested his name when he’d asked who “P” might have been.
“I wonder whether Pappas, or people working for him, came to the office. Maybe they threatened him. Maybe someone hit him. I know that Lenny’s afraid of Pappas.”
Joan gave a sharp, mirthless laugh. “Afraid of him? You don’t know anything, do you? Who do you think’s been taking care of him all these years?”
“What do you mean? I thought it was Medicare . . . no?”
“The Donegall Charitable Trust,” she said. “They’ve been paying all of his expenses since his stroke.”
“Donegall Charitable . . . Whose money is that?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that Alex Pappas made the arrangements. So before you accuse Alex of having your father beaten, put that in your pipe and smoke it.”
Donegall was probably a place in Ireland, Rick thought. “I don’t understand . . . Why did Alex Pappas arrange to pay for his care?” Pappas had never said anything about that.
“Because Alex Pappas is a loyal man. Your father did a lot of business for Alex, and Alex took care of him when he needed help.”
“The . . . cash-bank business, you mean. Collecting cash and giving out bribes and such.”
She shrugged. “I suppose I made deposits of cash in the bank when I was asked to. Sometimes I put cash in the safe. But the whole business didn’t concern me, and I asked no questions,” she said with an almost prudish, defiant air. “Your father protected me.”
“What do you know about the Donegall Charitable Trust? Do you have an address or a contact name?” Rick recalled the late-model Audi in Joan’s driveway and wondered whether the Donegall Charitable Trust was taking care of her as well.
“It all happens with wire transfers and such, and I don’t concern myself with the details. They’ve never been late with a payment, and there’s never been a problem.”
“So you don’t have a name?”
“You’re a persistent one,
aren’t you?”
“I never give up. Like father, like son, right?”
“I wouldn’t say so.”
“You wouldn’t?”
“Wasn’t your job all about uncovering secrets?”
“It was.”
“Well, your father was all about keeping them.”
40
Rick returned to the bed-and-breakfast in Kenmore Square, packed up his suitcase, and checked out. He drove maybe half a mile to a DoubleTree on Soldiers Field Road and booked a room. After checking in, he went online and looked up the Donegall Charitable Trust and found nothing.
Then he pulled out the Rolodex card Joan had given him and looked at Paul Clarke’s phone number in area code 603. Was it still a valid number? For some reason he imagined that people in rural areas—and Paul Clarke’s house was in a rural part of New Hampshire, that was for sure—moved around less often than people in large cities.
He thought about Clarke. He remembered a tall man in faded blue jeans and a barn coat, a man with silver hair and dark eyebrows. He remembered liking the man. He recalled the continual look of slight amusement on Clarke’s face, as though talking to you was like watching a mildly amusing sitcom. Clarke seemed somehow too elegant to be a maple syrup farmer. He seemed out of place in the old farmhouse.
Rick had no idea how old Clarke was, just that he’d been around the same age as Len. To a kid, thirty-five and fifty all look the same. Would he still be alive? If he was approximately Lenny’s age, he’d be anywhere from seventy-five to eighty-five. He might well still be alive.
If Lenny had driven up to New Hampshire to see Paul Clarke the week before his stroke, maybe he really had confided in him what he was worried about. Maybe Clarke would know something useful.
Rick took a breath and called the number.
It didn’t even ring. A recorded message came right on, a woman’s voice: “You have reached a number that is no longer in service. Please check the number and try again.”
So maybe the man had died. He went to his laptop and Googled Paul Clarke, looking for an obituary. Nothing came up. He tried ZabaSearch, typing in “Paul Clarke” and specifying New Hampshire on the pulldown menu. A result came right up:
Found 1 record for Paul Clarke
Paul Wayne Clarke, 82, Redding, NH
That indicated that Paul Clarke was probably still alive. The town was right. He called directory assistance in New Hampshire. A robot voice said, “Say the name or type of business.” When he said Clarke’s name, the robot said, “Let me transfer you to an operator.”
An operator came on a few seconds later. “Yes, in New Hampshire, how may I help you?”
“In Redding, can I have the number of Paul Clarke?”
The operator clicked away at her keyboard. “I’m finding a Paul Clarke, but the number is unpublished.”
“But there is a number.”
“Unpublished, sir.”
He hung up. Then he called his sister’s cell number. She answered right away. She was in some noisy place, probably the back of the vegan restaurant her partner ran. “Do you remember Paul Clarke?”
“Who?”
“Clarke. Paul Clarke.”
“Isn’t that a friend of dad’s, lives out in the boonies someplace?”
“That’s the guy.”
“The maple syrup guy! He used to scoop up snow from the ground and put maple syrup on it and make us eat it?”
“He didn’t make us eat it. We couldn’t get enough of it.”
“Maple syrup on snow. That’s like the most disgusting thing ever, so why were we so into it?”
“We were kids.”
“He and Dad used to go off and have these deep talks and we weren’t allowed to interrupt them, right? And he had this pencil trick he used to do that we couldn’t figure out?”
“Oh yeah. But he eventually taught me how. Anyway, I’m trying to reach the guy.”
“What for?”
“I’ll tell you about it sometime. Soon. For now, I’m just wondering whether you know where Dad might have put his phone number.”
“Did you ask Joan?”
“The number she has is disconnected.”
“Probably in his study someplace.”
“Which is empty now. They’re redoing some of the plaster work and repainting.”
“I have no idea.” In a mournful tone, she said, “I guess you can’t ask Dad.”
“Not exactly. Though he’s making progress.” He told her about the transcranial magnetic stimulation and how it seemed to be working. He didn’t tell her about Lenny’s “I want to die” message.
“What? You’re kidding me! Amazing. Do they think he’ll be able to talk eventually?”
“They don’t know. It’s all pretty experimental, and it’s early. Don’t get your hopes up.”
A few minutes later he hung up and decided to take a drive to New Hampshire.
41
He took precautions.
It had become almost second nature to him now. He’d traded in the Zipcar—after removing the GPS tracker from the rear left wheel well and sticking it on a nearby car—for a Suburban from Avis. When he returned to Boston, he’d check out of the DoubleTree and find some other place, maybe in one of the towns outside Boston, like Newton.
But he had to keep moving, had to avoid comfortable habits and routines, until . . .
Until he’d found out who was going after him and why.
He welcomed the long drive up 93 North to New Hampshire as an opportunity at long last to think. The driving was repetitive and dull, and his mind wandered; he couldn’t help falling into a reverie.
He found himself thinking about what Joan Breslin had revealed, that Pappas had been taking care of Lenny all these years. For what possible reason? It couldn’t be out of the goodness of Pappas’s heart.
And he found himself wondering what Joan was hiding. She’d never volunteered Pappas’s name when Rick had asked who “P” might be. That couldn’t have been an oversight. She was covering something up, he felt sure. He wondered if she, like Lenny, was afraid of Pappas.
Such payments could be made to buy silence. Maybe hers had been bought. Then why pay off Lenny, who couldn’t talk anyway?
After about an hour and a half of driving, the expressway cut a swath through the White Mountain National Forest, dense with pitch pines and red oak and cinnamon fern. It reminded him of the woods on Paul Clarke’s property, which must have been twenty or thirty acres at least. The sugar maples, when they visited one winter weekend years ago, all had spouts dug into their trunks, dripping clear sap into tin buckets. Mr. Clarke, tall and silver-haired and distinguished-looking, showed them how the full buckets of sap were collected.
Rick remembered walking into the sugar house where the sap was boiled down in the giant evaporator over a roaring fire, the sensation and the aroma of being hit by the wall of steam heavy with the sweet smell of maple syrup. It took forty gallons of sap, Clarke had said, to make a gallon of maple syrup.
Paul Clarke had seemed oddly hip and handsome for a friend of Dad’s. He looked, in his barn coat, more like a senator running for reelection than a farmer. They’d gone out for dinner at the only pizza place in town. Over pizza, Mr. Clarke showed Rick a trick with a pencil. He started with his hands together as if in prayer, a pencil grasped under both thumbs. Then somehow he swiveled his hands around and suddenly the thumbs pointed down, the pencil underneath his hands. It looked simple, but it was impossible to do. Wendy and Rick tried repeatedly. They asked him to do it slowly. No matter how many times he did it, they were unable to replicate it. Naturally they kept nagging him to show them how he did it.
“What’s the trick?” Rick had demanded.
“There’s no trick,” Mr. Clarke had replied with a poker face. Only later did Rick come to understand. It looked li
ke a trick, but it wasn’t a trick at all. It was all about technique. Nothing was hidden. What you saw was what you got. No trick.
He remembered his father and Mr. Clarke going off for long conversations in Mr. Clarke’s book-choked study. Rick and Wendy and their mother were left to read or hike in the woods. Rick, budding investigative journalist at age eight, got curious and stood outside the study door, listening, unable to make sense of their low voices. Rick woke early the next morning and found Mr. Clarke in the sugar shack, hard at work with the buckets of sap. At breakfast he finally persuaded Mr. Clarke to show him how to do the pencil trick, and he went around the house crowing to his younger sister, “I know the trick! I know the trick!”
But to this day he had no idea who Mr. Clarke was, this man who was one of his father’s closest friends. With the typical obliviousness of kids, Rick and his sister couldn’t be bothered to learn how Dad and Mr. Clarke were connected. Classmates? Colleagues? Was he an old client? What, exactly? They had no idea and never asked. For some reason Lenny had stayed in touch with Paul Clarke, had even gone to see him the week before his stroke. Rick wondered why.
When Interstate 93 emerged from the White Mountain National Forest, he drove past Franconia, then exited at Littleton and took 116 northeast along the curves of the Ammonoosuc River until he reached the town of Redding, New Hampshire.
All he knew was that Paul Clarke lived in Redding. He didn’t know where. He had nothing more than a post office box. But as he drove through the town, he began to recognize landmarks. They’d visited Clarke a few times, long ago, but it had been often enough that Rick remembered the town, in a sketchy sort of way.
He drove past a book barn that looked familiar, and next to it a general store. He remembered his mother and father browsing in the book barn for what seemed like hours while he and Wendy had gone to the general store nearby and shopped for candy and comic books. Then came the strip of storefronts, the art gallery, a children’s clothing store, a coffee shop, a place offering web and graphic design services.
The Fixer Page 21