Tableau
Page 16
“I make it so they never have to know,” Evan Nichols said. “I see her death, and I come to her. This curse I’ve been given, it won’t let me save the dead…but it makes certain that nothing gets in my way as I go about my work. Locks, alarms, bank vault doors…they all give way before me. I come to these ugly dead and I clean them- in the case of Missus Jensen, I pulled the drugs right from her dead veins. Just a touch of my hands. She was still dead, but her family’s memories of the woman they believe she was will be unmarred. She is dead- but not tainted. That is what I do.”
“Kevin Peters,” Ezra said.
Evan Nichols nodded. “Could I have one of those, Mister Beckitt?” he said. He lifted a slim, pale hand and gestured at the pack of Chesterfields lying on the couch cushion. Ezra stood on shaky legs and brought the cigarettes to his guest. Their hands touched. He didn’t feel anything. Evan drew out a cigarette and lit it, blowing smoke and nodding as if satisfied. “Young Mister Peters was a suicide,” he said. “He might have been the best shortstop they’d seen in fifty years out there in Barnhill…but here, at the college, he looked like what he was- a hayseed from the sticks who only knew high school ball and would never play anything but. He didn’t even make it past the first tryouts. His scholarship was the only way he could go to school here, and if he didn’t play they wouldn’t pay. And he couldn’t go back home again. He couldn’t stand the idea of going home a failure, washed up before he was even old enough to drink. So he killed himself- opened up his arm from wrist to elbow with the pocket knife his father gave him when he was twelve.”
“Jesus,” Ezra said. “And you…”
“Not me,” Evan Nichols said. “Whatever power is in me. I grabbed the boy’s arm at the wrist and elbow and the fatal cut was gone. Again, he was dead- but the family never needs to know how. They can convince themselves that their boy dropped from some freak embolism, or whatever they might think of. They will never have to deal with the dark legacy that comes from a suicide- the looks from their neighbors, the stigma. This is what I do. I’m shown terrible deaths, and I go and protect the legacy of these wretched dead.”
Ezra sat back on his couch. He looked around, focused on nothing. After a long moment he shook his head and brought himself back. “You were at Thomas Connor’s place because he was going to kill himself,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“That’s so.”
“Convince me,” Ezra said.
Evan Nichols shook his head, a headmaster disappointed in his pupil. “Oh, Mister Beckitt,” he said. “The man who demands to be convinced already is- he is entrenched in his own beliefs and cannot be swayed. Thomas Connor couldn’t get past the idea that his high school girlfriend, the love of his life, had been pregnant and was forced terminate both that new life and the life she would have had with him. He saw everything that had happened in the time since she left him- his tour of service overseas, the killings and interrogations, the sickness of the streets here in his once beloved Green City, as a direct result of that relationship rent asunder. Once he knew the truth, it ate him up. He couldn’t live with it. He couldn’t see a way out- no way but one.”
“But he lived,” Ezra said. He leaned forward with bright eyes; as if the two of them were fencing, and he had just scored a hit.
“That was not my doing,” Evan answered back just as quickly. “As I’ve said, I’m not allowed to interfere- only to make my little tableaux d’mort when it’s all over. You saved him. You are truly his great friend. You did this. His life is yours, according to the customs of some cultures…like the one your friend Jabjoth grew up in, for instance.”
Ezra sat back again, shaken. This time, his cigarette burned out between his fingers without him noticing the pain or hiss of its passing.
“The only question now,” Evan Nichols said, extinguishing his own cigarette in the ashtray between himself and his host, “is what will you do with me?”
Ezra gave him an incredulous look. “I’ll run you in,” he said. “What do you think?”
“On what charges?” Evan said. “Tampering with a crime scene? But how will you justify that charge? Will you tell your friend the commissioner that you’ve found a man who can predict certain deaths, a man who comes to those victims and draws the narcotics from their bodies, or heals the cuts along their wrists or the gunshot wounds to their heads, who cuts them loose from the noose and makes the abrasions disappear? Will you tell Jim Gorton that?”
The man was right and Ezra knew it. So what could he do? “Spose not,” he said. “Not if I want to keep my star and my job.”
“You will, High Guard Ezra Beckitt,” Evan Nichols said. The strange, pale man rose from his seat, closing up his long overcoat and putting the slouch hat back on his head. “You will go on protecting this city for years to come. You will do much good…and in the end, you will do something truly great.”
Evan stopped at Ezra’s front door and turned back. Maybe he wasn’t the Weeping Man…but he did weep. His eyes glimmered in the dim light coming from the living room. “I have seen your own death, Ezra Beckitt,” he said. “Do you wish to hear of it?”
Ezra looked over at him, blue eyes sparkling in the lamplight. He found his pack of Chesterfields and lit a new one, pulling himself out of the sagging couch with a groan. He went over to the small bar setup on top of his vidscreen and fixed himself a seven and seven, having a long sip of it. He sighed, and smacked his lips.
“Nah,” he said.