Days of Night

by Jonathan Stone

  His other life partner—his wife—lost to him at the same time as Paul. From two partners to none. From double love to double emptiness.

  Heller is sure that in the process of his recruitment for the McMurdo assignment, the US Marshal’s office, and maybe even Hobbes and the other administrators, saw much of the press coverage. He wonders, deep down, if his being their “first choice” was really about that. Not primarily about his police skills, which are unimpeachable, though arguably out-of-date. Not even primarily about being able to work alone, which he did successfully for years after Paul’s arrest.

  Is it more about his being incorruptible? Willing to go where the evidence leads. No matter where. No matter to whom. Even someone you care for. Even someone you love.

  Putting justice above anything else—and anyone else.

  Hobbes and company didn’t know what they would find in a full investigation of Lazo-Wasum’s death. And didn’t know, if something was found, what the judicial process after that would be.

  So did they ask for someone particularly dogged? Someone who’d proven a willingness to keep the blinders of justice on forever, wherever? Someone who would stay on it, see it through, no matter what?

  He never asked the US Marshal’s office how they chose him. Or how much Hobbes and his team had to do with the decision. He doesn’t really want to know, so clearly, so bluntly, if this is the reason. Let them—and him—live with the convenient lie of a stellar police record. And put aside that it is actually his commitment—his arguably inhuman commitment—to the rule of law. A rule-of-law robot. Willing to put everything else, even his own humanity and relationships, aside. That’s our guy.

  Oh, Paul.

  Paul who betrayed him.

  Paul whom he betrayed.

  Paul who has shaped his life. And whose life he has shaped.

  Trish Wong will be a great help to him. But she will not be a partner, exactly. No one can be a partner.

  Paul died of colon cancer in prison, only halfway through his sentence.

  Heller will never have another partner.

  Not really.

  Not like Paul.

  14.

  “Heller, huh? Joe Heller?” says Trish Wong, and Heller knows the line of questioning that is coming. “Any relation to the writer Joseph Heller?”

  “None at all. My parents were both high school dropouts. They liked the name Joe. They had no idea.”

  Trish smiles. “Have you read it? Catch-22?”

  Heller smiles back, shakes his head no.

  “Your name is Joseph Heller, and you’ve never read it?”

  He shrugs. He doesn’t mention that he’s brought a paperback copy with him. That he was thinking he might have the time here to finally read it.

  “I’m not a big fiction reader,” Heller says, “but I know the premise. That the only way to get out of fighting the war is to be declared insane, but if you want to get out of fighting the war, you’re obviously sane, so you have to keep fighting, right? Isn’t that it? Something like that?”

  “Yes. That the rules, the situation, makes no sense. There’s no logic, or an absurd logic.” Her smile has a playful slyness, he notices, as she says, “Like, to get a job in Antarctica, you need appropriate references. But you can only get the references if you’ve already worked in Antarctica. That’s Catch-22. You run into it all the time.”

  She pushes her straight black hair back, keeping it out of her way, to take a hearty bite of her spaghetti. A lean girl with a big, unthinking appetite. He likes that.

  “I majored in American literature before switching to science for grad school, to earn a living,” she says. “Heller wrote other novels besides Catch-22, but that’s the one he’s remembered for. And he’ll be remembered for a long time. As long as it’s part of the high school reading list. Although I guess it wasn’t on yours.”

  “Oh, it was on ours,” he admits with a smile. “But I was more interested in being a defensive end.”

  She looks at him and delivers a polite version of Hey, your loss. “It’s where high school kids first learn the idea of irony. And absurdity. And the fallibility of institutions—like the US military, but all institutions. Governments. Scientific organizations.” She smiles. “It’s where you learn the craziness of bureaucracy. It’s really a good book. Too bad you never read it, Joseph Heller.”

  He didn’t have to. Because he experienced it repeatedly, acutely, in his professional life—more acutely as a cop, as an officer of the law, he would argue, than others in their own lives. The inherent insanities of bureaucracy that he was nevertheless sworn to uphold. The insane murderers, who you would catch by coolly, sanely channeling their particular insanity. Rules that the criminals he chased were flouting, but the rules themselves were often insane, so did that make the criminal sane?

  “All my life, when people are introduced to me, it brings back memories of the term “Catch-22” for them, and all the absurdity and irony you’re talking about. I wish it would get taken off the reading list.” He smiles.

  She smiles back. “The fact that you’re named Joseph Heller, and you’ve never read it . . . I guess that’s good Catch-22 irony right there.” She cocks her head. “Are you sure your parents didn’t know what they were doing?”

  Heller smiles. “That’s the catch. They definitely didn’t.”

  She laughs.

  He likes this Trish already.

  15.

  Heller enters Robert Trebor’s room. He notices the differences immediately. Most of the sleeping quarters are haphazard, slapdash, random, unkempt spaces; clothes are flung over the backs of chairs and onto beds; beds are cozy, personalized centers of occupancy—books and laptops and phone chargers and more toys and puzzles and games than you’d think for purported adults, all spread around the rumpled bedcovers.

  But Trebor’s room is immaculate. More than that. Hospital corners on the bed. Books (at least a hundred) neat on the shelves—but more than neat—arranged precisely on the shelves not by author but by size and color. On the tiny desk, the desktop items line up with one another, Heller notices. Their edges make an orderly grid. The cell phone charging cord is wound neatly. The laptop cord is pinned behind the laptop, folded so as to be invisible, creating no clutter. The closet door is closed—but Heller knows the order he would find in the closet, or in the drawers. No photos. No trinkets.

  “Welcome, welcome,” says Trebor, and Heller can hear the strained effort at friendly normalcy, the constriction in the man’s throat. “Here, have a seat.” Heller notices that when Trebor pulls the chair out for him, he sets it perfectly perpendicular and, in fact, checks it by eye, before gesturing to Heller to sit.

  Whoa. A level of obsessive-compulsive behavior that Heller is not sure he’s seen in real life.

  “Very shipshape in here,” say Heller.

  “You mean obsessive-compulsive”—Trebor smiles—“but you don’t want to say it because you don’t know me well enough yet.”

  Heller smiles too.

  “Look, what can I say?” says Trebor. “It’s who I am. Who I’ve always been. Long as I can remember, anyway.” He glances at his desktop—double-checking one more time, Heller senses, to make sure nothing is out of place. “I know it’s overboard, but this kind of orderliness is how I feel comfortable in the world. It gives me, I don’t know, a sense of control. And independent of that, by the way, I do think the rest of them are just slobs.” He shakes his head in disapproval. “Don’t you?”

  “Oh, they’re pretty sloppy, most of them,” Heller acknowledges. Without adding So what’s wrong with that? “Look, I don’t want to interrupt your day here too much . . . ,” Heller says as he opens his notebook.

  “No problem. I welcome the interruption.”

  “Great, well, I just want to take a few minutes and go over a couple of things with you, Robert. You prefer Robert to Bob, don’t you?”

  Trebor looks alertly at him. “I’m Robert. Not Bob.”

  “I thou
ght so. Because I noticed that your last name, Trebor, is actually Robert backwards. Nice and orderly. A nice clear mirror of itself. No letters out of place. I’m assuming your first name was always Robert, and Trebor is a last name you adopted at some point as an adult. Is that right?”

  “That’s correct,” says Trebor, flatly, offering no further explanation.

  And then Heller, as if casually and unthinking but very consciously, turns his chair a little—the chair Trebor had placed so carefully—ostensibly to face Trebor a little more, but in truth to see his reaction.

  Trebor winces. Doesn’t like it. Is clearly uncomfortable. Seems to want to reach out to the chair and “correct” it but manages to contain himself. Takes a slow, deep breath, Heller notices.

  Heller doesn’t know if Trebor realizes his own discomfort about it, or is his reaction totally unconscious? Yes, the man knows he’s obsessive. But may not realize he’s this obsessive.

  And then Heller does something sympathetic, generous—and calculated. Perhaps the ultimate helpful thing he could do to put Trebor at ease, take down his guard.

  As if just as unthinking, as if casually, Heller shifts the chair back into alignment.

  Trebor looks at him. But Heller gives no acknowledgment of what he has done. Pretends not to notice.

  But now he has a baseline for his next question.

  “Obviously, I want to ask you about Sandy Lazo-Wasum.”

  No reaction.

  A slight shift of a chair creates a wince. A murder causes no response at all.

  “Ask you about the night he died.”

  “Sure. Ask away.”

  Either Trebor had nothing to do with it—Heller’s instinct—or Trebor has prepared himself very well for this moment, rehearsed it, practiced for it—something that, of course, you would not put past such an obsessive personality.

  “I’ve heard you knew him pretty well,” says Heller. He hasn’t heard any such thing.

  Trebor blinks. Confused by the question. One the obsessive-compulsive could not have prepared for. “Well, that’s just not . . . not the case. I . . . I’m not really that close to anybody here.”

  “Ever sit with him in the cafeteria?”

  “Sure, at the same table.” Silence. Followed by “Fourteen or fifteen times.” Heller has the impression that Trebor has actually just added up the occasions. “But not next to him.”

  “Meaning, no conversation?”

  “Just an exchange of pleasantries.”

  “Give me your own whereabouts that night. Sketch out your own evening.”

  “Sure,” says Trebor brightly. “I was here, reading.” He smiles, gesturing to the book-laden shelves. “No surprise, I guess. I was three quarters of the way through Hunter’s Delight,” gesturing to it.

  On the one hand, how could he remember that? On the other hand, of course he would.

  “Hunter’s Delight. Is that a mystery? I think of scientists as reading a lot of nonfiction and science texts.”

  “Yes. It’s a mystery. During the winter, I only read mysteries.”

  “Locked-room mysteries,” says Heller.

  “So someone told you,” says Trebor. “Yes, I’ll pick a series or two and read the whole thing. Immerse myself in the personality of the detective, in the puzzles of the case. I love it.”

  “Locked-room mysteries. Tell me about that.”

  “It’s when the guilty party and all the relevant clues are there from the outset. It’s when there’s nothing extraneous that can explain it. The clues are all there. It’s just up to the detective to unravel them.” He looks at Heller. “I have to admit I was kind of excited to have you stopping by today. I was looking forward to it. Because in all my reading of these things, I never imagined that I would be involved in a locked-room mystery. That it would occur in my own life. Ironic, given my eccentric reading predilections.” He tilts his head. “Detective, I know it hasn’t escaped your notice . . . that Sandy Lazo-Wasum’s death is a classic locked-room mystery.”

  “What do you like about them so much, do you think?”

  “The sense of control. The sense of order. It’s an orderly puzzle. And you know, they do all get solved.”

  “So I better solve it, yes? You’ll be more comfortable when it’s solved?”

  A loaded question for a killer. Heller is looking for some reaction. Any reaction. He doesn’t know exactly what.

  But there is none. “We’ll all be more comfortable when it’s solved,” says Trebor blandly. As if by rote.

  “All right, let’s talk about that evening.”

  Trebor sketches his uneventful evening—for which he has no alibi or backup, of course—right through hearing the commotion the next morning. “I ate at seven, in my regular spot at the second-to-last table. People are kind enough to leave that chair for me. I finished at seven fifteen. I came back here at seven twenty-five. I washed my face, brushed my teeth.”

  “This was months ago. How could you possibly remember that so precisely?”

  “That’s the beauty of it,” says Trebor, with a kind of elation and sense of victory, a sense of relief. “I don’t have to remember it. Because I do it exactly that way, at exactly that time, every night.”

  “Do you have any kind of verification of that?” asks Heller. “I mean, did anyone see you?”

  Trebor brightens. “Well, no one saw me, but that is my verification. It proves I was in here the whole night.”

  Heller looks at him inquisitively, waiting for him to explain.

  “Stadler and Matthews keep their door open. They’re always in the galley. They would have seen me go in or out at some point. But they didn’t. Check with them. They should be able to verify that. That’s your proof. There’s no window, right?”

  “So you didn’t leave your room—not even to go to the john?”

  Trebor’s look darkens. He looks down. Doesn’t answer.

  Something there. “These interviews remain confidential,” Heller assures him. “Unless there’s something material that surfaces.”

  Trebor looks up at Heller, as if from an underground place.

  He goes to the dresser. Opens it. The dresser that Heller knew was so neat. But out of a drawer that Heller figured was socks and underwear in an orderly row, Trebor removes a sealed bottle, three-quarters full of liquid. Yellow-tinted liquid. He holds it out to Heller, who recoils a little, quickly realizing it is urine.

  “I don’t like to leave here once I’m in for the night,” Trebor says. “I pee at ten forty-five, before I nod off, and again at five fifteen in the morning. That’s my routine. That’s when I go. To the minute. I check the clock.” He looks at Heller. “I presume this helps prove my whereabouts.”

  Locked-room mystery. A little more locked-room and a little more mysterious than Heller expected.

  16.

  Conducting interviews, learning about poisons, and, at the same time, the third, subtler element of his Antarctic acclimation and exploration: understanding McMurdo.

  Getting the feel of it. Its rhythm. Its subtleties that one would never notice at first.

  For instance, as he gets to know the scientists and their experiments a little, he learns that, while some experiments are frivolous commercial ventures—testing new flavors in the cold (taste receptors alter in extreme temperatures), trying new cold-weather designs for clothing manufacturers (so they can claim they’re “Antarctic tested”)—other experiments are significant. Creating hardier crops amid extreme growing conditions. Testing new pharmaceuticals in an environment free of hundreds of trace airborne microbes and chemicals that contaminate the other six continents—pharmaceuticals that hold the potential to treat and even eradicate certain global diseases. These experiments are about improving humanity. Giving people a better chance. These scientists have come to the end of the earth, cut themselves off from humanity, out of their commitment to humanity. Turning their backs on it in order to save it. Hidden in their puffy parkas, behind their glasses, beneath the
ir complex mathematics and papers and scientific language, these are quiet heroes. Extraordinary people, whose default character traits are generosity, care, making life better. Who never question that this is their purpose and, more than that, life’s purpose.

  But of course, they share McMurdo—its barracks and cafeteria, its rutted roadways and canteen and noisy ATVs and disorganized street plan and pop-up seasonal bar—with a very different kind of person. The person who is just here for the job, for the better-than-decent wage. The electrician and IT support staff and logistics monkeys and administrative personnel and blue-collar maintenance and food-prep teams, who could be working anywhere. Who would prefer that Antarctica was somewhere in the Caribbean, on a sunny beach, but, hell, this is where the job is, this is where the paycheck is, so what are you gonna do?

  Heller knows that the intersection of those two kinds of people, and those two outlooks, must create some tensions, even some unconscious hostility. Heller suspects that those groups, unfamiliar with each other, at such close quarters, may rub together in unfamiliar ways that could, very occasionally, turn lethal.

  He notices that there is a third group. A special subset that draws a little from the first two groups but has members all its own. This third group is not really a group at all―it’s outliers, odd types, special cases, who actually like—seek out—the isolation. Who like the time and light extremes. The kind of people who like the temporal changes of pot or powerful pharmaceuticals, who like Ferris wheels and roller coasters, who like disruption from normality, who like disorientation. Who have some deep trouble with normal, with stasis. This environment, these living conditions, catch their attention, this kind of person. He has the feeling that this person—this personality—can thrive fully, bloom fully during winter-over. Can safely shed their skin. Undetected. Unobserved. Undiscovered. He has a sense, here and there, of that kind of personality, waiting, patiently—or impatiently. And he notices it makes the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. When not much else does.

  He notices, for all three groups, for everyone here, the constant contrast of isolation and community. Both experienced in the extreme. You are on top of one another, thrown together, inseparable from and reliant on one another. Yet you are cut off, isolated from the rest of the planet, certainly, but, as if in a planetary echo, from one another too. He notices there is not a compensating sense of camaraderie. A sense of isolation surrounds you every day, burrows deep into your bones. There is a built-in distance between people here, a sense of privacy that is respected, an invisible but impermeable wall, maybe because of living on top of one another.