Emperor of Ocean Park

by Stephen L Carter

  “I’m sorry,” I mumble, resolutely refusing to imagine what could be a thousand times worse than what happened to Father Bishop.

  “Foreman was a good man. He joined up with Scott to do an arms deal. It doesn’t matter where. The point is, he managed to win Scott’s confidence. Or so we thought. When Scott came back from overseas to track down your father’s arrangements, he brought Foreman along to help.”

  “Or to keep an eye on him.” Nunzio’s earlier euphemism implied that Foreman was from the Central Intelligence Agency, which makes legal sense, if the operation against Scott began overseas. “Scott might have suspected him from the start … .”

  “Yes. That’s possible.” He shrugs again. “Anyway, he obviously suspected him at some point.”

  “Now I see. You didn’t just lose track of Scott. You lost track of Foreman. That’s why … that’s why …”

  That’s why you panicked, I decide not to say. That’s why you kept encouraging me to keep looking. That’s why you kept telling me I was safe. You knew Foreman was in trouble, so you waited for me to lead you to Colin Scott.

  I allow my eyes to close. The pain is overwhelming me now, and I yearn to get back into the bed. But I have to raise a last subject. “And that was the goal, wasn’t it? To get Scott back into the United States? That was the point of the operation?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean, Professor,” he fences.

  “Yes, you are. The Judge … my father … died, and somebody had to persuade Scott that there was now a risk that something would come out that he didn’t want to come out.”

  “Oh, I see. Yes, that’s right.”

  Spoken quickly again, evasion in his tone. What is going on here? One more question that I will never have a better chance to ask.

  “So, then, my father … was he murdered or not?”

  The way Fred Nunzio ponders before answering, rubbing his chin and squinting, is a terror in itself. “No, Professor,” he says at last. “No, we don’t think so.”

  Even through my sedative-clouded mind, his words are a bolt of lightning. “You don’t … think so?”

  “No evidence of murder. Nobody with anything to gain by it. So, no, we’re pretty sure it was a heart attack, just like the autopsy said.”

  “Pretty sure?”

  He spreads his hands. “Life is probability, Professor, not certainty.”

  Maybe. Maybe. Nothing ever seems to be a hundred percent certain any more. All this time, and I am still chewing on cotton.

  “Agent Nunzio?”

  “Yes, Professor?”

  “The two men who attacked me that night? The ones who got … who got their fingers cut off?”

  “What about them?”

  “You think Jack Ziegler did it, don’t you?”

  “Who else? He was protecting you and your family, remember? Mutilating the men who attacked you was probably his way of sending a message.”

  “To whom? A message to whom?”

  For the second time I have the sense I have brushed up against knowledge he would prefer to keep from me. “Anybody who was paying attention,” he says finally.

  “But didn’t everybody already know about his … his edict?”

  “Evidently not.” Again the evasion.

  “If you … if you know Jack Ziegler did it, why don’t you arrest him?”

  Fred Nunzio’s eyes go flinty. “I don’t know he did it, Professor Garland. Nobody ever knows Jack Ziegler does anything. No, that’s not it. Everybody knows, but nobody knows how they know. No proof, ever, where your Uncle Jack is concerned.”

  Probably I grunt. Nunzio doesn’t like it.

  “How much do you know, exactly, about your Uncle Jack?”

  “What I read in the papers.”

  “Well, let me explain something to you. Let me tell you why his word was enough to protect you. Do you know what Jack Ziegler actually does for a living?”

  “I can guess.”

  “You can’t guess. So let me tell you. He’s what you would call a broker, a man who could manage, say, a friendly takeover by interests in, oh, Cali, Colombia, of an operation in Turkey. Everybody trusts him to tell the truth, because he pays in blood if he ever lies. His fee is a percentage of the value of deal. I guess you would call him an underworld investment banker. We figure his annual income at between twenty and twenty-five million dollars.”

  “So why isn’t he in prison?” Still counterpunching.

  “Because we can’t prove any of it.”

  I try to process this image, a man who lives by his word in a dangerous world, a man whose promises are so honored that he … he can …

  Oh!

  In spite of everything, a grin tugs at my mouth.

  “What is it, Professor? What’s funny?”

  “Nothing, nothing. I … Look, this has been a little rough. I have to lie down. Will you help me back to bed?”

  “Huh? Oh, sure.”

  Nunzio allows me to sling an arm over his well-muscled shoulder, and half sturdies, half carries me back to the glorified crib that the hospital has provided me.

  On the way, I throw out another question: “So what was the big deal with Colin Scott? Why mount an operation to get him to come back to the States?” He hesitates. “Let me guess. I don’t need to know that, either, right?”

  “Sorry, Professor.”

  “No problem.” I stretch out and buzz for the nurse, who shows up a moment later and begins to straighten the sheets and plug in all the right sensors.

  “The box,” I whisper as the nurse does her work. “Have you found out who took it?”

  “Not yet.” His tone is grim and determined. He has been embarrassed, I realize, by the way things turned out. “But we will.”

  “I hope so.”

  He looks at me. Something in my voice, I worry for a moment, has given away the game. “How did you figure it out?” he asks. “Your father’s message, I mean? What made you think of the cemetery?”

  “I had told him … told my father, I mean … a story about the cemetery. A long time ago. A personal story. Maybe he thought I would realize at once that the … the cemetery was what he meant. I don’t know. I just … I guess I forgot it for a while.”

  I do not like the look on Agent Nunzio’s hard face. He thinks I am hiding something, which is true. “What made you remember?” he asks sharply, just the right question to catch me lying, except that I have my answer ready.

  “The two pawns,” I say tiredly. “One delivered inside the law school, one outside.”

  “So?”

  “A white pawn, a black pawn … separated by the walls of the law school. My father used to say all the time …” I yawn. My exhaustion is not feigned. “He used to say the wall separated us … separated the two nations, even in death.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The Old Town Burial Ground. It used to have a segregated area in the back … a kind of black cemetery within a cemetery … and the … my father liked to walk there.”

  Nunzio gives me a law-enforcement stare, skeptical and scary. But I lack the energy to be properly intimidated. I peer up at him through the mists of pain and exhaustion. “You did well, Professor,” he says at last.

  “Thank you,” I murmur, relaxing once more. “And thank you for coming.”

  “Oh. Oh, you’re welcome. My pleasure.” And he is pleased, I know he is: pleased that I have let him off so lightly.

  I watch him go, smiling to myself as my body sneaks toward sleep. He doesn’t know, I tell myself, delighted at my own cleverness. Nobody knows except Dana. We fooled Colin Scott, we fooled Maxine, we even fooled the FBI.

  The box for which Colin Scott died and Dear Dana and I were nearly killed is worthless. The pouch inside is empty. I know because those were my instructions a month ago when, unable to act myself because I was being followed, I asked Dana over lunch at Post if she would buy a metal box and bury it for me.

  CHAPTER 54

  AN UNSTEADY R
ETURN

  (I)

  YOU DON’T QUITE REALIZE how busy a family keeps you until you don’t have one any more. On the day of my release, I visit with Bentley for a couple of hours, playing in the back yard of the house on Hobby Hill while Kimmer works at the kitchen table. My bags are neatly packed in the front hall: Kimmer and Mariah did it together, a rare moment of truce as each eagerly anticipated getting what she wanted. The Felsenfelds drop by to say hello, but also, I am sure, to keep things calm. When our neighbors have gone, my wife and I have one last argument, for old times’ sake. I probably start it, but Kimmer certainly finishes it.

  We are in the kitchen, chatting, as though this is any other day, when we run out of conversation, and I finally say what every spouse in my position finally must: “I just don’t get it, Kimmer. I really don’t.”

  “What don’t you get?” I sense her simmering hostility, which has grown since the first day she visited me in the hospital, perhaps because my approaching departure makes all our decisions suddenly real.

  “What you see in him. In Lionel.”

  “For one thing,” she says calmly, “he has me doing things that would never even occur to you.”

  “Like what?” I ask, stupidly, the wrong answer, blowing my last chance, my very last chance to win her back, but it is probably way too late anyway. Besides, my mind is too busy for caution. I am thinking: Bizarre sexual practices. Barefoot walks in the snow. Drugs.

  “Like reading!” she spits out, to my astonishment. “Nellie isn’t like you, Misha. He doesn’t think he’s twice as smart as I am!”

  I almost ask her—it is a very near thing, but I restrain myself—why, if I am twice as smart as she is, she earns twice as much money as I do. The truth is, I have never thought I was smarter than Kimmer; but Kimmer has always thought I do. When she first fell in love with me (or whatever it was she fell in), she told me that she admired what she called my brilliance. When I told her that I am not particularly brilliant, she grew irritated and accused me of false modesty.

  Besides, she was smart enough to realize that she couldn’t quite hide her affair, and smart enough to fool me into thinking that her paramour was Jerry Nathanson.

  “And you really think this, um, relationship is … uh, serious?”

  “It’s not a relationship,” Kimmer corrects me with the connoisseur’s precision. “It’s just something that happened. One of those things. He says he loves me, but I think it’s probably over.” Her voice is soft again, complacent, and I have the sense that she does not quite love him back, but sees Nellie instead as a conquest. The great Lionel Eldridge, who can have half the women in the city, winds up with a woman nearly a decade his senior. Yet I know even this is not the entire story. I envision Lionel, smoldering with anger against me for what he perceived as mistreatment in the seminar last year, working at Kimmer’s firm, seeing her every day in her snazzy pinstriped suits, watching her stride confidently through the world where she is the superstar and he is the rookie, the world he is unlikely ever to master, the world Kimmer and I have already conquered. How could he resist the temptation to try? Here is Professor Garland, infuriatingly strict, pointedly unimpressed by Sweet Nellie’s celebrity, and there is Professor Garland’s wife, Kimberly, tall and sexy and seemingly unattainable. I see Lionel brooding at his desk in some quiet cubbyhole, turning the idea over and over in his mind, speculating, plotting, wondering whether my wife might not be the tool through which he could gain a measure of revenge. I imagine his initial overtures, most likely rebuffed, but perhaps not all that forcefully, because Kimmer, as she warned me back when we were courting, is always on the lookout for something new.

  Or maybe my theory is too self-centered. Maybe my wife was the aggressor. Maybe there is no theory. Maybe, as Kimmer says, it was just one of those things.

  “He’s a married man,” I point out.

  “He doesn’t love her,” Kimmer sniffs, her being Lionel’s wife, Pony, formerly a model or an actress or something, and the mother of his two children.

  “So, is he leaving her, too?”

  “Who knows? It’ll work itself out.”

  The argument is inconclusive, because there is no point to concluding it. I return to the yard to play catch with Bentley, and my wife returns to the work she has spread over the kitchen table. In the early evening, my sister arrives in the Navigator to pick me up. Me and my bags. In the hallway, I say goodbye to Bentley. To my surprise, he does not cry, little Garland man that he is, and I wonder what, precisely, his mother told him. He is not pretending to be brave: he seems genuinely unconcerned.

  Kimmer does not kiss me or hug me or smile. Standing in the foyer in her blue jeans and dark sweater, not far from the threshold over which I laughingly carried her on the day we moved in, she reminds me calmly that I can see my son any time I like, I only need to call—the real message being that she is in charge of my contact with him and wants me to know it. She has yet to forgive me, although it is not clear precisely for what. Kimmer has not had her hair cut in several weeks, and her Afro has grown in a bit, so that now, a sturdy blockade to any further penetration of the house, anger beaming from her dark, sensual face, she reminds me of one of the black militants from the old days. She should have a fist raised in the air, a placard, a chant: Sufficient power to the appropriate people! Not what any of the marchers ever said, but certainly what most of them actually meant. Or so the Judge used to proclaim, in his furious dismissals of the steaming rhetoric of the radicals of my youth. They don’t really know what they want, he would accuse. They only know they want it now, and they’re willing to use “any means necessary” to get it.

  Well, Kimmer certainly knows what she wants, and she is willing to destroy her family to get it. She would probably answer that staying in this marriage a moment longer would have killed her, and, given my antics in recent months, I could scarcely blame her. Perhaps we were ill-matched from the start, just as my family always suspected. The marriage was my idea to begin with: having made so bad a fit with her first husband, Kimmer wanted less, not more. She argued at the time that ours was a “transitional relationship,” a cruel yet convenient phrase left over from the self-indulgent sixties. She insisted that we were not right for each other, that each of us would, in time, meet somebody better. Even when I finally persuaded her to be my wife, she remained pessimistic. “Now you’re stuck with me,” she whispered after the ceremony as we snuggled together in the white limousine. “This was a big mistake,” she told me dozens of times over the years, meaning our decision to marry—usually in the middle of a fight. Yet, whatever might be the virtues of choosing not to marry because you know you and your partner are a poor fit, it is not obvious that they transfer automatically to a marriage almost a decade old, with a child in the middle of it.

  We should have tried harder, I realize as my stomach churns. My failings are surely as great as Kimmer’s—but we should have tried harder. I consider saying this, even suggesting that we try again, but the hard set of my wife’s lovely face tells me that she has already locked that proposition out of her mind.

  Our marriage is truly over.

  “We’d better go,” Mariah whispers, tugging at my arm, when I just stand there staring at my wife, who returns the stare unflinchingly.

  “Okay,” I say softly, tearing my gaze away, fighting the hot mist on my eyes, willing myself to act as the Judge would have acted, even though the Judge would never have been in this predicament in the first place.

  Wait.

  I sense the edge of something: the Judge, who would never have been in this mess, and my wife, defiant in the hall, the images running together, fitting in with that last conversation with Alma, as the final, astonishing piece of the puzzle clicks into place.

  Mariah and I drive down Hobby Road, away from the elegant old house where, until the night I was shot, I lived with my family. I do not look into the rearview mirror, because my father would not have done it. I am trying, already, to draw the line he
always preached. The process will be as much fun as having an organ removed, but it is never too early to start planning. Yet, through it all, buried in the deepest crevice of my mind, is a tiny exaltation.

  I know who Angela’s boyfriend is.

  (II)

  WE MAKE THE NERVOUS DRIVE OVER TO DARIEN, and I move into Mariah’s guest house. By the next day, I am a member of her household. For two weeks, I eat healthy meals prepared by her cook, walk the well-tended grounds, and swim in the heated indoor free-form pool, the rest and food and exercise building up my strength. I coo sincerely over the new arrival. I telephone Bentley every morning and every night. I play with my sister’s disorderly children and, in the evenings, listen to her disorderly theories as she flips through the channels looking for another game show. Howard is almost never around, either spending the night in the city or flying off to the other side of the world. So we sit there, Mariah and I, on the imported brushed-leather sofa in the forty-foot family room of the nine-thousand-square-foot manor house. All the furnishings are so perfectly arranged that the children are allowed to visit very little of the first floor. It is like living in a magazine layout, and, indeed, Mariah says sadly that the designer submitted photographs to Architectural Digest, but nothing came of it. Her tone suggests that this is a genuine defeat.

  I watch my sister, the best of us all, soldier her way through her loneliness in the midst of all this wealth while the au pair raises the children and the cook prepares the meals and cleans up afterward and the gardener comes by every other day to tend the plants and cut the grass and the cleaning service drops in twice a week so everything sparkles and the accountant calls every few days to discuss a bill that just came in—it occurs to me that Mariah really has nothing to do. She and Howard have purchased every service that middle-class folk like myself assume adults are supposed to perform. Apart from regular breast-feedings of little Mary, shopping and watching television and decorating are all she has left. So I start taking her out: to the movies, to the mall, hobbling on my cane around an art exhibit in the city while we push Mary in a stroller and two or three more of her children gambol in our wake. Mariah is too restless to take much interest. I try to talk to her: about the latest Washington scandal or the new Toni Morrison, because Toni Morrison has been her favorite author ever since The Bluest Eye. I ask after her children, but she shrugs and says they are right there if I want to see how they are doing. I ask how her golf lessons are going, and she shrugs and says it is still way too cold. Recalling what Sally said about how she and Mariah liked to go to clubs together, I offer to take my sister out to listen to some jazz, but she says she is not in the mood. Nothing draws her. She seems too unhappy to bother being depressed.