“John,” he said, saying his son’s name out loud for the first time in years. “Can I see him sometime?”
She faced him, her arms folded across her chest. There was a glimmer in Nancy’s eyes, a great sadness, and she stepped a bit closer. He tried to read her eyes, and suddenly a horrible thought occurred to him. His son was dead. He looked at her and tried to read her, and the sun was bright overhead, spinning, a large, ominous ball whirling out of control. He could feel tears coming into his eyes. She stood a little closer.
“No,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense. I understand what you want, but he doesn’t know you. His father is up there. There’s no point.… Come on, before these bugs are all over us.”
They stood there for a long second, the mosquitoes singing high and crazy in the trees.
“I just wanted to be sure he was all right,” said Lofton.
“Of course,” she said. He followed her up the path. He stopped at his car, waiting to say good-bye, but she kept walking, on up to the house.
After Lofton had left Nancy, he drove back to Holyoke. It wasn’t until he was within sight of the city, and saw the church spires and mill stacks against the early-evening sky, that he remembered the meeting he’d set up with Amanti the last time he’d seen her, when they’d ducked behind the press box while Dazzy Vance worked the Sunday crowd. He was still unsure of her motivation, whether she was working for Kelley or against him; it could even be that she’d changed her mind again by now.
When he reached Amherst, it was almost dark. Amanti was waiting for him, Brunner’s papers spread out on the table before her.
“I told you I’d get them,” she said.
Amanti wore a white, sleeveless blouse and smoked hard on her cigarette. She had been drinking, and she flicked her ashes carelessly, but otherwise, there was little sign of drunkenness. If anything, she seemed sharper, more engaged than usual.
Since the last time she’d seen Lofton, Amanti had been busy. She had gone back to the secluded office to which Brunner had taken her on the day he revealed his involvement with the arsons. This time she had gone alone. There were two keys to the place, one for the alarm system and the other for the door. She’d remembered Brunner’s gathering up the keys. She’d found them in the same place, unmarked, lying loose in a steel drawer in the bottom of his desk in the Redwings’ office.
She had gotten the keys Sunday at the park and had already returned them. But in between she had gone to the other office, in the wetlands near Station Road, outside Amherst. Once inside she thumbed through the Rolodex on the desk until she found a listing scrawled in Brunner’s hand: “Big Time Carnival.” She had watched Brunner do the same thing, that time when he had been drunk and shown her the papers. As he talked, he’d looked up at her the way a more normal lover might when he revealed some personality flaw, knowing the revelation would come back to haunt him, that he’d made himself vulnerable, and that she would repeat it back to him, somewhat nastily, in such an everyday place as the grocery line. Brunner, however, did not reveal such ordinary flaws. Instead, he had fumbled for this listing in front of her.
Beside the listing, as Amanti expected, she found the combination to the safe. As she took out the papers, she felt a rush of exhilaration, a satisfaction, but she also had in front of her the image of Brunner’s face: the slightly drunken twist to his lips and glare to the eyes that had told her that he expected her to betray him, that he did not know how or why or when, or that it would even have anything to do with the papers, but that he knew it would happen. The memory of the inevitability in Brunner’s glance filled her with a kind of dread.
Why am I doing this? she wondered. Taking the papers and giving them to Lofton would ultimately hurt Brunner more than Kelley, though it would hurt Kelley, too; the senator could not pressure Brunner by threatening to reveal a scandal that was already public knowledge. Kelley’s plan would be ruined. Amanti thought of the hours she spent alone in her apartment. The hours seemed to her to have been spent in darkness, a time in which she was in hibernation, a kind of windup doll, an object among other objects. By coming to the office and taking the papers, she had put herself into action; if the end result was to destroy the world she knew, then at least she knew how Brunner felt when he was planning his arson or Kelley felt in making plans against Brunner. She could envision the ruined lives with an eerie satisfaction; at the same time she could tell herself she had done the right thing. Then she thought how she couldn’t know what the results of her actions would be, or if anything would change. She couldn’t even tell if her actions were truly her own, or if, instead, they were the result of an impetus from the outside, the spring inside the doll uncoiling, moving her feet across the floor, raising her hands, opening the safe. In the end, however, she knew the reasons made no difference. She was already in motion. She was doing what she was doing.
Now the papers sat on the table in front of her. She had spent time studying the papers and thought she had it figured out. She poured some scotch—it wasn’t her drink, but it was all that was left in the house—and started explaining things to Lofton. In this folder, she told him, there are photocopies of insurance contracts that had been issued to different people and companies, all for property with Holyoke addresses. “Brunner’s been running an arson ring—a big one. Some of those are proxy owners; some of them are real. Either way, Brunner gets a cut when the building burns.”
“How do you know they’re proxies?” he asked. She was getting ahead of him, showing him the papers faster than he could take them in.
“Here, look at these.”
She handed him another folder. Inside, he found more legal documents, these concerning ownership rights and payment transfers for much of the same property covered by the insurance contracts. He could not tell much at a first glance, but Amanti seemed to be right. Substantial parts of the insurance money found its way into Brunner’s hands; much of the rest went to people with Boston addresses. He noticed that the law firm handling the contracts, Nassau & Associates, also had a Boston address.
“I thought your cousin was Brunner’s lawyer. How come Liuzza didn’t draw up these papers?”
“I’ve wondered about that myself. Maybe Brunner didn’t want him to know what he was up to.”
Amanti gave him more to look at. First, there was a packet of papers, full of receipts for supplies and work down at the mill, American Paper. The work hadn’t been done, Lofton knew, but that didn’t mean Brunner wouldn’t include it in his insurance claim when the time was right.
She handed him a small green ledger book. Each entry contained several items: the name of the hotel, a date, and then a dollar-and-cents number, the figure ranging from anywhere between a thousand dollars and fifteen thousand. Each page, down at the bottom, bore Dick Golden’s signature. While Lofton turned the pages, she explained the book. It contained the names of the buildings that had burned so far, the date Golden contacted the torch, the amount of money Golden passed along, and the amount he kept for himself. Brunner made Golden sign the entries, she guessed. That way Golden was implicated, too; he stayed under Brunner’s control.
“You’ve spent a lot of time with these papers,” Lofton said. “You’ve got this pretty well figured out.”
“No, I didn’t have to think too hard. Jack Brunner’s a smart man, he doesn’t trust too many people, but he has one problem: He wants people to know he’s smart. In that envelope, the brown one, there are copies of canceled checks, contributions supposedly, to half the politicians in Boston. Kelley’s father-in-law, Jim Harrison, is one of them. Brunner’s tied a lot of people into this scheme. It’s his protection. If he falls, they fall, too, and they aren’t going to let that happen. He’s proud of himself; it all shows how smart he is. Only there aren’t too many people he can tell.”
“So he tells you.”
“You’d be surprised what people say late at night. They think it’s all forgotten in the morning,” Amanti said, swinging her foot, somewhat
surprised at herself. The bedroom wasn’t the place Brunner had told her, but it felt that way. It was as good as the truth.
Lofton looked over the papers. There was a lot of information here. Enough to prove that Brunner was running an arson ring and that a lot of prominent businessmen and politicians were getting a share. A good public prosecutor could ruin a lot of careers. A good defense lawyer, however, could confuse the information, introduce document after document, keep the proceedings long and dreary and confusing, so that much later, maybe even years—when the jury finally sat down to make a decision—the real evidence would be so buried, so muddled, no one could tell who was guilty. It was a standard defense tactic in cases like this. Lofton had known reporters who had covered similar court cases, sitting on hard benches day after day, month after month, until finally even the press lost interest and wished only for a verdict, any verdict.
“Even if all this does protect him, Brunner’s not going to be happy. Your friend Kelley killed the Holyoke project in committee. That leaves Brunner with one big building, American Paper, that he can’t collect on. The insurance companies are already moving to devalue the property, and if he burns it now, that will look pretty suspicious.”
“He’ll figure something out,” Amanti said. “He’ll burn that building, and he’ll get his insurance payoff. He never intended to renovate anything. The only reason he bought it in the first place was to prevent competition with the Hillside Mall. He as good as told me. Even with the federal money it would cost him too much, and he could make more burning it. He wants Holyoke to stay the way it is.”
Lofton went over to the curtains and stared out at the evening. A car door opened and slammed. A man sat on the stoop across the street. The faint noise of children, playing in some backyard after dark, rose and fell in the darkness. It was all very domestic, very normal.
“Stay away from the window,” she said. “You’re making yourself nervous.”
“Won’t Brunner get upset when he finds out these papers are missing?”
“He won’t know I took them, but even if he guesses, I won’t be the one he’ll hurt. It’ll be you.”
Lofton didn’t like the sound of that, but she was probably right. Even so, her voice quavered. She took another drink.
“For somebody that’s not nervous, you’re sure drinking a lot.”
“I haven’t been able to sleep. It relaxes me.”
Amanti crossed her legs. Though at times she stammered, hesitated, and looked at the world blurrily, she was still pretty sharp. He glanced at the glass in her hand. “Why don’t you lie down and rest while I go through this stuff?” he said. “It’s going to take awhile.”
Amanti leaned back a little, watching him go through the papers. He had to admit the alcohol didn’t seem to have much effect on him either; at least it hadn’t dulled his nervousness. He went to the window every few minutes. She assured him that Brunner did not pay her unexpected visits, that it was an unwritten rule between them, but Lofton still could not shake the overriding feeling of the man’s presence. Maybe it was just the papers. Maybe they smelled of the man. Also, despite everything, he wondered if pilfering the papers had really been Amanti’s idea; he still suspected Kelley’s involvement.
“What made you change your mind? Why are you giving me all this stuff?”
Amanti hesitated. She had an answer, somewhere inside her, but she couldn’t call it forth. After the night she’d made love to Lofton, she’d called Kelley. When she finally got hold of him, his reassurances had been the same as always; afterward she’d been angry and tired. No matter what she did, nothing changed. She couldn’t get over the feeling that her life was buried, somewhere beneath the surface, a secret obscure even to herself. The events that happened—the scheme she’d been helping Kelley act out—were only a reflection of her life, not the thing itself, and she was trapped in the reflection. She tried to express this to Lofton, and to express, too, the things she’d been thinking while standing in Brunner’s office, the papers in her hand, but she only stammered. The alcohol was suddenly catching up with her, a sleepy darkness, and she felt her reasoning, her motivations, slip into that darkness.
“Kelley’s two-timing me in Boston,” she said. “He’s got another mistress.”
Lofton questioned her mathematics, but he said nothing. When Kelley slept with Amanti, he was two-timing his wife, sure, but Lofton didn’t know the arithmetic for what Kelley was doing to Amanti or—for that matter—what Amanti was doing back. The only thing that seemed clear was that she was jealous, and the jealousy was strong enough, at least for now, to motivate her to drive down to Brunner’s office, grab up these papers, and give them to him. How she would feel tomorrow, Lofton couldn’t guess, but it didn’t matter now. He studied the papers. When he looked up from them, Amanti was still watching, but her eyes were half-closed. Later, when he looked back again, she was lying on her stomach, asleep.
Lofton looked out at the street again. The man who had been sitting on the porch across the way was no longer there, the noise of the children was gone, the same cars stood parked by the curb. Everything seemed quiet, safe. Still, he wondered about the wisdom of studying the papers here. Despite Amanti’s assurances, somebody might happen along. He should take the papers back to Holyoke, maybe run off copies, then have Amanti return the originals. Otherwise, Brunner might find out the papers were missing, and there was no sense in inviting trouble. Meanwhile, he would be better off studying the papers back in his hotel in Holyoke. Better yet, he would get his things, check into a new hotel, and study the papers there.
Amanti lay on the couch, her legs splayed apart, face to the wall. Her black slacks were tight, the collar of her blouse was turned up in back, one of her sandals hung off her foot. For a moment Lofton did not want to leave. Something about the whole scene—the scattered papers, the empty glasses, Amanti prone and vulnerable on the couch—stirred his desire. Taken from the outside, without any idea of context, the scene could be a domestic one, the woman lying there could be his wife, the papers could have to do with their business or their taxes. He might touch her gently and help her into the bedroom. Things weren’t that way, of course, and because they weren’t, he felt his desire even more keenly, in a way that, if this really were a domestic scene, he would probably not even feel at all. If this were the scene he imagined it to be, he would not yearn for the woman on the couch but for someone else, a stranger.
He gathered the papers into a pile, then searched the room for anything he might have missed. On the trunk in the corner he found Amanti’s photo album. It lay open, as if she had been looking at it recently. He flipped through the pictures: Amanti as a child, then in college, her lips pursed in a cashmere pout, and then the shots of her and Kelley.
He placed the book back where he’d found it and walked over to say good-bye to her. Amanti was lying on her back, the top of her blouse undone, her face soft with sleep. She moaned groggily. He touched her on the stomach, felt the elastic band of her black slacks, and then went into the kitchen. After getting a brown paper bag from under the sink, he gathered Brunner’s papers into the sack and left.
Lofton took the back highway to Holyoke. He wanted to think, to avoid the main roads. Another car took the same turn—he watched for a while in his rearview mirror—but the car stayed well behind.
He passed a small, lighted corner in South Amherst, a convenience store on one side of the street, a gas station on the other. Once he was past here, it would be darkness until he was over the Notch. He looked down at the stack of papers beside him on the seat. Now that he was away from Amanti’s apartment he felt more comfortable. He looked forward to getting out of his old hotel and into a new one, someplace bright and cheap along the expressway, where he could take his time with the papers.
Lofton started mulling things over. It seemed he had the evidence he needed now, proof that Brunner was working behind the scenes, putting the touch on the Boston politicians. Brunner had hidden the arsons
pretty cleverly, Lofton admitted, so that when American Paper finally went—it was the prize, the biggest, the multimillion-dollar bonus baby—then its burning would seem the culmination of a spree, of the violence and self-destruction that victimized everyone in the city, usually the poor. At the last minute, however, Kelley had found out about the arsons, decided to play politics with what he knew, and tied up Brunner’s plan. The big one wouldn’t burn; Brunner couldn’t collect. He wondered what Brunner planned on doing now, how he would set up the burn.
The car behind him gained ground, its lights coming up quickly in the rearview mirror. Lofton panicked, but then the car slowed down, maintaining its distance. A drunk, that’s all. Then the car rushed back up on him again.
Lofton’s station wagon sputtered on the hill. The car was on his bumper now; its headlights flashed off and on. “Bastard,” Lofton hissed, “just get around me.” He edged over to the shoulder, giving the car room to pass. The car stayed on his tail, looming in his rearview mirror, a steel dark shadow. Lofton glimpsed the man’s silhouette through the headlights’ glare, and he imagined the man in the other car, the brightly lit dashboard, the car surging beneath his feet. The lights on his own dashboard were burned out, the upholstery was torn, patched with duct tape. The car behind him swerved into the oncoming lane, then swerved back.
When they reached the Notch, a flat hollow of land cradled between the sharp peaks of these low hills, the driver leaned on his horn. He pulled up close to Lofton, backed away, pulled close again, flashing his lights off and on, his horn blaring through the darkness. The road crested and headed downhill. In his old boat of a car Lofton did not dare drive much faster. He would lose control. The car came up close, and Lofton tried a trick he had learned on the California freeways to keep tailgaters at a distance. He touched his brake pedal lightly. On a car like this, with its brakes worn, you could often trigger the brake lights before engaging the brakes themselves. The trick worked. The man behind him hit his brakes; his car wrenched to the side, spun, lost ground, but then came down on Lofton again, faster than before. Lofton tried the trick again; but the car came down on him hard and fast—right up my ass—and Lofton swerved onto the gravel shoulder. He felt himself floating, weightless, behind the wheel, felt the dizzy rush of the darkness around him. The wagon spun and crashed, and the world disappeared into a Crosshatch of fear, an ugly black wave that washed over him and then away, leaving Lofton sideways on the seat, broken glass lying scattered over him. He touched himself for blood but could not find any.
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