Surrender, New York

by Caleb Carr

  As I was pulling on my holster, Mike located his keys; then we made for the hatch. “We locking up?”

  “You’re damned right,” I said, seizing the big padlock, letting Mike pass me, then banging the hatch closed and securing it. A thought suddenly came to me: “I wonder if I should wake Clarissa up.”

  “Clarissa?” Mike said. “Why?”

  “She had a feeling something like this was coming—she had it timed almost exactly right, too…” I hobbled down the steps, shaking my head. “No, forget it. We get her up now, she’ll be in no state to do much more than bite our heads off. Besides, she hates going into Surrender.”

  “Who doesn’t?” Mike said, snapping the lights in the hangar off as we passed out its mouth.

  “True,” I replied, starting down the hill. “But we are going. This is it, Michael.”

  “This is what?”

  “You know exactly what I mean,” I answered, working my cane hard. “The dam has burst. Whatever happens now sweeps us all toward the solution…”

  He didn’t reply, choosing to absorb that statement instead. Mike knew, of course, what I was talking about; but the climax of any case—so easy to view with longing during the hard days of assembling evidence and ideas—is always far more intimidating than one had supposed during those early stages. And so we walked on silently toward the car, the sounds of morning continuing to rise; and above them, that same peculiar chirrup of Marcianna’s—part warning, part apprehension, part something I did not yet understand—rose up and into the dawn with ever more insistence.

  “What’s with her?” Mike finally asked, when we’d reached the Empress.

  “I don’t know,” I said, going around to my door and opening it. “But I don’t like it. Let’s go…”

  Faust enters into a pact with Mephistopheles…who empowers Faust to obtain the pleasure he seeks. Faust then seduces Gretchen. But, in doing so, he indirectly causes the deaths of Gretchen’s mother, her brother and ultimately Gretchen herself….Faust realizes that he, like Gretchen, her mother, and her brother, has become a victim—of Mephistopheles….Gretchen has been seduced by Faust; Faust has been seduced by the devil. The Faust tale generates several microdialectics. In the first, the thesis is the predator (Faust), the antithesis is the prey or “victim” (Gretchen), and the synthesis is predator = victim (Faust). Predator and victim are united in Faust, who is both. He is the synthesis.

  —LEONARD F. WHEAT, HEGEL’S UNDISCOVERED THESIS-ANTITHESIS-SYNTHESIS DIALECTICS

  Who holds the Devil, let him hold him well; He hardly will be caught a second time.

  —GOETHE, FAUST, PART ONE

  {i.}

  Upon arrival at the Kurtzes’, we found things roughly as Lucas’ phone call had indicated they would be: the kid was charging around shouting and tugging at great clumps of his hair, as if to cause some physical discomfort that would both balance his shock and keep him from tears, while Ambyr was sitting frozen at a small table in the kitchen, on which sat a single dim light that made it impossible to see into the corners of the space. The more illuminated living room gave a fairly clear picture of how gloomy home life had been for Ambyr and Lucas even before their parents had run out on them: it fairly screamed beer drunks, with furnishings not quite so broken down as those in the dwellings of completely dysfunctional alcoholics, but nonetheless old and worn, reflecting a desire to keep costs down and make sure that the requisite case was in the refrigerator every night. Efforts had been made to clean and cheer things up in a few spots, but these only served to remind one that Ambyr, for all her remarkable discernment, was blind, and could ultimately do no more than supervise two teenaged boys in the effort: boys who likely put as little value on making their home more cheerful as had the Kurtzes’ parents, if for very different reasons.

  Once one’s eyes adjusted to the light in the kitchen, a sad duality became apparent. This was the room that, in most country homes, was both the light, active center of family activities and the receiving area for company: virtually no country house that I had ever seen, including Shiloh, used any other room as its primary entrance. The Kurtz house was no different, save that recent, blatant attempts to achieve greater hominess had been made: a small dinette set was plainly new, along with a set of still-sparkling steel appliances, all of which had doubtless been paid for by a state government desperate to hush up how badly Morgan Central School had bungled Ambyr’s physical crisis. But beyond these, wallpaper that had likely hung in the room since the early twentieth century stood fading and peeling. Amid this rather dispiriting contrast, the Kurtz siblings had lived their lives since Ambyr’s illness and their parents’ departure, somehow managing to become, in a testament to the defiance of the youthful spirit, two fully formed people who would have been exceptional whatever their circumstances.

  Ambyr was dressed, I noticed as I drew closer to her chair, in a becoming but arrestingly out-of-place midnight blue Chinese silk robe. In one hand she held what I assumed was Derek’s departure note; in the other she cradled her head, keeping her eyes fixed on the table lamp as though she could see it. She must have heard our entrance, although she could not seem to gather the strength to quiet Lucas’ repeated protestations: “The whole thing’s wrong! It’s not his writing! I’m telling you, somebody must have forced him to go!”

  I went to crouch by Ambyr’s chair. “Hey. Are you all right to talk?”

  When I spoke to her, she sniffed away what seemed only the latest round of weeping, and nodded, shifting in her chair toward the sound of my voice. “I guess you’ll want to see this first,” she said, her voice still trembling just a bit as she held the note out.

  I took the piece of paper from her hand, but before I had even a chance to glance at it, Lucas declared, “I don’t know why you wanna see it, it’s obviously a fake!”

  “All right, Lucas,” Mike said. “We’ve gotten a good idea of your opinion. So get a grip on yourself and we’ll all get to work. Right?”

  “Damn straight,” Lucas declared. “Get to fucking work is right: finding clues is what you guys should be doing! Get trace evidence, fingerprints, whatever it’s going to take. The only one who’s done anything so far is Kevin, over there, and he’s got no training—”

  “Lucas, enough!” Ambyr finally said, warning him with a weary slap of her cane on the floor.

  The mention of some unknown “Kevin” was momentarily baffling; but then and for the first time, I noticed that a young man, perhaps a little older than Ambyr, had been standing in the shadows near the kitchen door of the house the entire time. At the mention of his name, he came forward, and stood close enough to Ambyr that I found the proximity at first irritating, and then somewhat disheartening: I knew that Lucas had said that Ambyr had no boyfriend, but whatever her feelings for this presentable young man—who had the handsome looks and wiry frame of local youths who were a cut above their peers—he clearly felt very protective and even proprietary over her.

  “This is Kevin Meisner, Trajan,” Ambyr said. “He drives me to and from the Disability Center, and he also lives right nearby. I was worried that we might have to get a ride up to your place, if you kept not answering your phones.” She turned to face the lamp again, pointing wearily toward the general area where Mike and I stood. “Kevin, this is Dr. Jones, and that’s Dr. Li.”

  I stood to shake the stranger’s hand, finding that he possessed a good, confident grip; then Mike did the same. Kevin was very straight and deferential in his greetings—“How do you do, sir? Doctor?”—and he locked eyes with both of us in an admirable way that let us know that he had been called to help Ambyr and her brother, and would do all they required of him to achieve that end. That aside, however, for someone we had not yet heard anything about, he appeared very familiar with and at ease in the Kurtz house.

  “Kevin goes hunting with Derek,” Ambyr said, “so he knows him pretty well, and I wanted him to see if there was any sign that anyone had been around the place while we were asleep.” Then
she added, very pointedly, “We’ve told him what’s in the note.”

  I got the message: Kevin knew about Derek, but that was all he knew. Ambyr and Lucas had kept him in the dark about our wider investigation. I made a noise of assent, then looked to our unaware interloper. “Well, Kevin, it’s good that you were able to get here—and did you find anything? Or maybe I should ask what you looked for, in the first place.”

  “Kevin’s a very good tracker,” Ambyr rushed in to explain, “and—”

  But she stopped when Kevin touched her shoulder, very softly and even tenderly, to indicate that he could speak for himself. It was an action that, in my foolishness, I found especially irritating. “I parked my truck up by the Francos’ old garage,” he explained steadily. “Their house is the next one to the north, and it ain’t been sold yet, so the driveway’s empty. I wanted to get a look and see if there were any fresh tire tracks in the driveway here that I couldn’t explain, but assuming that your Crown Vic’s got seventeen-inch Cooper radials—”

  “Which it does,” Mike said. “Well spotted, Kevin.”

  Kevin nodded appreciatively. “Then that was the last thing in and out of here. Course somebody likely just pulled off to the side of 34. None of the windows or doors in the house’ve been forced, although most of the windows were already open. But all in all, I’d say that if Derek went, he went on his own steam, and by his own choice.”

  “Which only shows what you know, Kev,” Lucas said bitterly. Then the kid turned to me. “Look, L.T., Kevin may be an okay tracker, whatever, but he doesn’t really know Derek, they just hunt together, which means they sit in different spots in the woods for hours. Other than that, he’s just the guy that was assigned to drive Ambyr back and forth to the Disability Center, end of story.”

  I looked at Kevin again. “Is that the case?”

  “Well,” the young man said, showing great patience with Lucas’ little outburst, “originally, yeah, that was the truth. That’s my job, giving people lifts who are out of bus range for the Center.”

  “But he’s been a good friend for a long time,” Ambyr said reassuringly. “And you, Lucas, can stop being insulting to people just because you’re worried. You know perfectly well that Kevin knows Derek and that he’s an excellent tracker—even Derek said so, whenever they went hunting together. Besides, we needed to find some way to get Trajan and Mike down here before—”

  And then she stopped, rather awkwardly, especially for her, clearly showing regret that she might have made some kind of error. And, in the face of this, I turned quickly from her to Lucas. “Guys? Is there something else that Mike and I should know about? Have you called other people?”

  Those questions quieted even Lucas, at long last, although his silence was less ambiguous than his sister’s. His gaze fell to the floor, as if he’d been caught at something more serious than the many transgressions I’d known him to commit during our acquaintance. Then he started talking fast: “Well—you guys still weren’t answering your cell phones at, whatever, four o’clock. I know you sleep up in that frickin’ enclosure sometimes, Doc, and I figured Mike was probably passed out in the house from the beat-down I gave him. We hadn’t thought of getting a ride from Kevin, yet, and then we didn’t know if he would even answer his phone. Plus, it was just a kind of an automatic thing, I guess you could say. I mean, she is our cousin…”

  I nodded, glancing at Mike: it was understandable that they would have done it, of course, but it was not good news for us: “You called your cousin Caitlin?”

  “I’m sorry, Trajan,” Ambyr said, quite genuinely. “But we were pretty out of our minds, and like Lucas says, she’s our cousin, and she promised to keep it quiet—”

  “An impossibility,” I murmured, considering the matter. “I fear…”

  “What’s he mean?” Lucas said to Mike, growing more bewildered and a little scared. “She said she would keep it quiet.”

  “Lucas,” Mike explained quietly, “your cousin may be your cousin, but she’s also an officer of the law. There is almost no way she didn’t report this to her superior.”

  “Yeah,” Lucas readily agreed. “To Major McCarron. She said she was going to, but that it wouldn’t go any farther than that.”

  I sighed out the full measure of my foreboding. “That’s what I was afraid you’d say,” I told the kid. “Major McCarron is a very good man, Lucas, but he cannot treat the sudden disappearance of a minor as a private matter: particularly a minor who he knows to be—” I tried to find the gentlest wording I could: “Who he has legitimate reason to believe will have trouble safely navigating the world outside his established home and habits.”

  “So any communication between your cousin and the major was almost definitely not private,” Mike continued. “McCarron had to report the matter. And once it was reported, everybody in law enforcement heard about it, and now they’re all gearing up to horn in on whatever happens next.”

  “Which means we don’t have long,” I said, sitting in the chair to Ambyr’s right. “But before we begin—will you please tell me that you didn’t call anyone else? Like maybe the National Guard?”

  Ambyr smiled and found my wrist with her hand—a gesture that Kevin noted with a quick movement of his eyes, although he betrayed no emotion about it. “No, Trajan,” Ambyr said, her voice quite intimate. “Just Kevin and Caitlin. And I’m sorry if Caitlin was a risk, but—can we just move on to whatever we’re supposed to do now?”

  “All right,” I announced, pulling a small notepad and pen out of my jacket’s inner pocket and starting to scribble something on it. “Lucas,” I went on as I wrote, “you guys have, I presume, a computer with some kind of printer?”

  “Sure,” Lucas said. “An iMac with a laser printer, upstairs—more goods from the state. Why? Don’t you want to read the note that’s supposedly from Derek?”

  “In a minute,” I replied, still scribbling. “Ambyr, we’re going to produce a little note of our own for you to sign, if you don’t mind, to try to forestall what I’m certain is going to be the interference of the Bureau of Criminal Investigation in what we have to do…” Finishing with the pen, I looked up at Ambyr’s would-be protector. “Kevin, I trust that your being here means that you understand that Ambyr and Lucas would like Dr. Li and myself to take the lead in finding out what’s happened to Derek? And, further, that your being here means that Ambyr trusts you enough to witness this document, and treat whatever takes place in the next few minutes in confidence?”

  “Definitely,” Kevin answered.

  “Good—then Lucas, take this.” I handed him my scribbled note. “Kevin, Mike will go with you two, and help you set up the formatting so that it looks like a semi-official document that you can sign right away.”

  “Hey!” Ambyr said. “Can I at least hear what it says? I’ve gotten a little tired of signing things without knowing what they are.”

  “Of course, Ambyr,” I said. “I was going to read it to you when it was printed up, so that you’d be sure everything was done right, but if you’d rather—” I leaned back to the others. “Michael?”

  Mike snatched the note out of Lucas’ hand. “You’ll never be able to read it, anyway, kid, trust me.” Eyes on the paper, Mike deciphered: “ ‘I, Ambyr Kurtz, being the legal guardian of Derek Franco, a minor fifteen years of age, residing at,’ gives your address, ‘hereby authorize Doctors L. Trajan Jones and Michael Li,’ yada-yada, our address, ‘to act as private investigators in the matter of said Derek Franco’s disappearance on,’ yada-yada, then comes, ‘Said Doctors Jones and Li, having experience and expertise in these matters, as well as being personally acquainted with Derek, are hereby authorized to speak as my legal agents in all matters pertaining to this investigation, and are to be considered as acting with my full authority. Signed, Ambyr Kurtz.’ Then our signatures, and Kevin’s, ‘Legal Witness.’ You’re over eighteen, I assume, Kevin?”

  “Yes, sir,” the young man answered dutifully.

  �
�Okay then,” I said. “No need for a notary. I left it ambiguous, as we have no idea right now just what we’ll need to do. And I didn’t go so far as power of attorney, because that would have to be notarized, and I suspect that Ambyr’s had enough of monkeying with her legal rights, anyway.”

  “Thanks, Trajan,” Ambyr said quietly. “So exactly what does this do, then?”

  “Well, among other things, it entitles us to be present at any interrogation of either you or your brother, and to do whatever else you or we say is necessary to find Derek. The BCI won’t fight it—they’re not going to risk that kind of press.”

  “Yep,” Mike said. “It’ll cover all that, at least for a while—and L.T.’s right, the BCI do not need any more bad publicity, right now. They’re still dealing with having to let the Patricks go.”

  “Sound okay to you, Ambyr?” I asked.

  She nodded quickly. “Of course. I’m sorry if I sounded suspicious for a second—”

  “No need for apologies,” Mike interrupted. “We get it. But L.T.’s right, we need to get this puppy printed, signed, and witnessed before anybody else gets here.” He turned to Kevin, and then to Lucas. “Okay, junior, where’s the computer?”

  Lucas took out some of his boiling frustration on Mike’s shoulder. “Hey! I told you about that ‘junior’ shit—the ‘kid’ crap is bad enough.”

  “The computer, Lucas,” Mike answered wearily. “Let’s go…”

  As the three of them started upstairs, the kitchen fairly filled with awkwardness, which Ambyr soon tried to dispel: “I’m so sorry, Trajan,” she said, but I cut her off, attempting to force a good-natured chuckle:

  “Why? He seems like a very decent guy, certainly nothing to apologize for—”

  “Will you stop?” Ambyr more ordered than asked. She grabbed my hand tight. “He’s just—he’s been doing favors for us for a long time, and I thought we were just friends. Then Lucas started warning me that he thought Kevin was going somewhere else with it—I guess I’d been trying to deny it, because there’s basically been no one else in Surrender that I’ve really felt we could trust. And then, when we asked him to come over tonight, in case we needed to get up the hollow fast—well, maybe I guess I couldn’t deny anymore that he thought I was giving him some kind of signal…”