Emperor of Ocean Park

by Stephen L Carter

  “You’re right. The fact that Meadows clerked for you wasn’t enough.” My palms and the small of my back are moist with perspiration. I still have a faint hope of escape. The storm that was supposed to keep me safe can still rescue me, if only I can keep Wainwright talking a little longer. “But I knew there had to be … like you said, a third party … because I knew that there was somebody out there who was unaware of Jack Ziegler’s edict.”

  Genuine puzzlement. “What edict?”

  “That I wasn’t to be touched. The other people who were after me, they all knew the rules. I couldn’t be hurt, and nobody in my family could be hurt. Jack Ziegler had made a deal with … well, whoever one makes such deals with. The word went out. I would not be harmed, and I would find what my father hid. So everybody just watched me and waited. Then, once I started to get hurt, it was clear that either the rules had changed or a third party was involved. I was … reassured that the rules were not any different. So it had to be an outsider. Someone without contacts in Jack Ziegler’s circles.”

  “You’d be surprised where I have contacts, Msha.”

  I know what he means, but I shake my head. “It isn’t enough that Jack Ziegler can reach you. You would have to be able to reach him.”

  Wainwright doesn’t like this at all; I can see it in his face, which has morphed from sardonic to furious. Maybe he does not like remembering that he was never as close to Jack Ziegler as my father was. A new variation on the Stockholm Syndrome: the bribee wants to be the favorite of the briber. I remind myself not to try scoring points off an armed man.

  “So Jack Ziegler put out an edict,” he says finally, letting out a long breath. “He said nobody could harm you.”

  “Yes. And you didn’t know about that, so you sent a couple of thugs after me. And there was one other thing.” I have backed completely around the butcher-block table. Now Wainwright is in front of the sink. George Jackson, his leg just about ripped off, is still a shield between us.

  “What thing?”

  “Meadows. She started calling me Misha. Who could she have heard it from? Not Uncle Mal, he calls me Talcott. She could have heard Kimmer say it, but I doubt she would have been forward enough to pick a nickname only my wife used. I could only think of one person Meadows would know in D.C. who also called me Misha. You.”

  Justice Wainwright nods, smiling distantly. “That’s very good. Yes. I will have to be more careful in the future.” He sighs. “So, it’s over, Misha. Give me the disk, and I’ll be on my way.” I glance at the kitchen door behind him. He sees me do it. “There’s nobody else, I’m afraid. Nobody is coming to rescue you. It’s just the two of us. So give me the disk. Please don’t make me ask again.”

  Still I play for time. “What’s so important about the disk? What’s on it?”

  “What’s on it? I’ll tell you what’s on it. Protection.”

  “What kind of protection?”

  “Oh, come, Misha, you have surely figured it out by now. You’re not the dunce you pretend to be. Names. Names of the people with interests in all those corporations, all those years. Cabinet secretaries. Yes. Senators. A governor or two. Some CEOs and prominent lawyers. A man who has such a disk in his possession can buy a good deal of protection.”

  And then I see it. “Oh. Oh, no. You mean protection from Jack Ziegler. He still has his hooks in you, doesn’t he? Or his partners do? And they won’t let you stop, will they?”

  “They won’t even let me retire from the Court. They’re so very demanding.” I say nothing. Even though I had nearly figured it out, the implicit confession has rocked me. “But your father was no better. When I asked him to share his hidden information, he just looked at me and told me I was a part of his arrangements. And if I didn’t stay away from him, everybody would know.”

  “A year before he died,” I murmur, finally getting the point.

  “What was that?”

  “I, uh, was wondering what your cover story is for being on the Island.” A lie, but I suspect that any call upon his vanity will lead to a disquisition. He has to show me how smart he is. Before he kills me, that is.

  “Really, Misha. Everybody wants me as a houseguest. Yes. Well. You made a few mistakes of your own. You were too deliberate, Misha; it was clear you were preparing to do something. I heard about the hurricane, and that you were coming up here anyway. Well. I realized what you were up to. I accepted a long-standing invitation. This afternoon, when the storm came, I went for a walk.” That crooked smile again. “I told my hosts I like storms. I am out walking at this very moment.” The wind blows the back door open, then snaps it closed again. And Wainwright no longer wants to reminisce. “All right, Misha, enough talk. Now, give me the disk.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t be silly, Misha.”

  I find a surprising stubbornness. “My father didn’t leave it for you. He left it for me. I want to see what’s on it, and then I’ll decide what to do with it.”

  Justice Wainwright fires a shot. There is no warning and his hand barely flickers. The bullet zips past my head as I duck, too late of course, and buries itself in the kitchen wall.

  “I was a Marine, Misha. I know how to use this gun. Now, give me the disk.”

  “It won’t do you any good. It’s useless. It’s been up in the heat too long. It’s all warped.”

  “All the more reason for you to give it to me.” I shake my head. The Justice sighs. “Misha, look at it from my point of view. I can’t do this any more. I have been in bed with these people too long. I need to get out. I need that disk.” His eyes harden. “Your father refused to tell me where it was, but I can certainly get it from you.”

  “My father refused,” I repeat. “Two years ago this October, right? That’s when you asked him to tell you where it was hidden?”

  “Possibly. So? Have I made another mistake?”

  “No, but …” But that’s what spooked the Judge, I am thinking. It was Wallace Wainwright—not Jack Ziegler, as I have assumed—who scared him so badly that he went to the Colonel to borrow a gun. And joined a shooting club to learn how to use it. Wainwright, tired and wanting to retire from the Court, went to see him, a year before he died, and tried to make him share the information he had hidden to protect himself from Jack Ziegler and his partners. The Judge refused, and Wainwright threatened him with exposure, which sent my father scurrying hat in hand to Mles Madison. A few months passed, nothing further happened, and my father put the gun away. Then, last September, a desperate Wainwright reappeared, and my desperate father went back to his gun club. I try to imagine these two judicial icons, one on the right and one on the left, jousting over the materials that now rest in this bear; battling because each wanted frantically to escape payment for a lifetime of corruption on the bench. “The gun,” I whisper. “Now I see.”

  “What gun?”

  “The Judge … obtained a gun. He was …” I thought the surprises were finished, and this one seems scarcely plausible. But it is the only explanation. Uncle Mal had it completely upside down. What my father told the Colonel was the literal truth: he wanted protection. But not, as Mariah imagines, from a would-be killer. He wanted protection from a blackmailer. On the screen of my mind, the last month of the Judge’s life unscrolls. When Wainwright reappeared, my father called Jack Ziegler, and the two of them had their secret dinner. It is so easy, now, to see what favor the Judge must have asked that led his old friend and chief tempter finally to refuse him. Seeing the humor in our string of errors, I manage a laugh.

  “What’s funny, Misha?”

  “I know you’ll find this hard to believe, Mr. Justice, but I think my father planned to kill you. Seriously. If you didn’t leave him alone, if you kept threatening to expose him. He bought a gun, and I think he planned to shoot you with it.”

  (11)

  Wainwright’s eyes darken. For a grim moment, he seems to be contemplating another way the story could have ended. Then his face twists in a snarl. “So now you know
what kind of man your father really was. The great Judge Oliver Garland. You say he was prepared to murder me. Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. He was a monster, Misha, a soulless, selfish, arrogant monster.” Outside, another tree splits in two, the crunch loud and sudden. The gun quivers as Wainwright glances around. Then his wrathful eyes are on me again. I see now why he hasn’t killed me yet. He wants the son to suffer first for the sins of the father. And it seems to be working. “Your father is the one who got me into this mess in the first place, Msha. He’s the one who got me started. So what do you think of that?”

  I say nothing. I am no longer capable of surprise where the Judge is concerned. But it is easy to see how the Judge might have enticed him. The poor boy from Tennessee trailer trash makes good. A rich wife? Perhaps the fruits of two rich decades of taking bribes, laundered through his wife’s family. Something. Too sophisticated, I am sure, for me to figure out, but the result is the same: Wallace Wainwright, the great liberal, the man of the people, got rich from fixing cases.

  At least, if motive matters, my father did it for love.

  “He was like a devil, your father. You have no idea how persuasive he could be! And quite thoroughly corrupt. Is that cold enough for you? Taking his orders from Jack Ziegler. Voting the way he was told. Think about that, Misha. But he was so clever that nobody knew. And when he approached me, he was very cagey, he talked his way around to it slowly … . Never mind. A love of money is the root of all evil, isn’t it? I wanted to do good and do well, and your father … exploited that.”

  I am about to protest that my father never took money; and then I hold my tongue, for I see it as part of his evil genius that he kept this fact from Wallace Wainwright. I will never know just how the Judge seduced the future Justice, but I notice how Wainwright’s self-pitying diatribe has caught the cadence of Washington: he took the bribe, but it was all the fault of the briber.

  Wallace Wainwright seems to realize how he sounds, for he calls a halt. “We have spent too much time on memory lane, Misha. Now, the disk, if you please. Just put it on the table.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “I’m not afraid of you. You don’t dare hurt me.” Desperation. “You saw what Jack Ziegler did to your drones.”

  “Ah, yes, my drones. Good word. Drones. Yes.” A tone of pride. If I can just keep appealing to his vanity, I can keep him talking. “It’s not that easy, you know. To find drones, I mean.” That crooked smile. “I am, after all, a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. You have no idea what risks I took. I had to go back to my contacts from the old days, in the Marines … . Never mind. It was a risk, but that chain is broken. Yes. The drones never knew who hired them, and nobody can trace it back to me.”

  That chain is broken. Perhaps Wainwright himself has removed the key link. With, say, the very gun he is holding on me.

  “I see.” Just something to say. The casual admission that he, in his position, has recently murdered somebody has left me in little doubt about my own fate.

  “No, you don’t see.” Reaching across the table with the gun, then drawing it back before I can figure out whether to try to grab his hand. He is unaccountably angry. The wind blows something against the porch. “You don’t agree. You think if you were in my position you would have made a different choice.”

  “I just know the choice you made.”

  Without warning, Wainwright explodes. “You’re judging me! I don’t believe this. You’re judging me! How dare you! You’re even worse than your father!” He gestures wildly with his gun hand, which gets my adrenaline pumping harder. “You probably think I should have done something noble, like turning myself in. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Do you have any idea who I am? For the last decade, I’ve been the only hope, do you realize that? The Constitution is dying, in case you didn’t notice. No. It’s being murdered. It’s fine for you to cast stones, you sit in your office and write articles that nobody reads. I’m the one who’s been up there fighting for freedom and equality in this reactionary age! I’ve been leading a whole wing of the Supreme Court!” His voice softens. “And they needed me, Misha. They did. The work we’ve done up there for justice is too important to let it be derailed by … by something like this. I couldn’t quit, Misha. Even if Jack Ziegler would have let me go, I didn’t have the right. The Court needed me. The nation needed me. Yes, all right, I’m not a saint, I made some compromises a long time ago, I know that. But the issues matter, too! If I had left the Court, if my wing had lost its leader, the law would be inestimably worse. Don’t you see that?”

  Yes, I see it. I am dizzied by his hypocrisy, but I see it. Temptation, temptation: Satan never changes.

  “So you … couldn’t resign.”

  “No, I couldn’t. This was bigger than me. My fate didn’t matter, only the issues. It was a calling, Misha, the fight for justice, and I had no choice but to heed it. The Court needed me. To preserve some vestige, however small, of decency and goodness up there. People believe in the Court. If I had allowed scandal to damage the image of the Court, real people would have been hurt.” He is back to the beginning and seems exhausted by his own argument. “Real people,” he says again.

  “I see.”

  “Do you, Misha?” Waving the gun again. “I wish I could fight on, I really do. But I’m tired, Misha. I’m so tired.” A sigh. “Now, please, Misha, give me what I came for.”

  Still reeling from his diatribe, I muster a final bit of pluck: “And then what?” When he says nothing, I say what I am thinking: “You didn’t just come here for the disk. You came here to kill me.”

  “True. I did. I won’t lie about that. I wish there were another way. But, Misha, you still have a choice to make. I don’t want you to suffer unnecessarily. Your death can be swift and painless, a bullet in the back of the head, or it can take time—if I shoot, say, your knees first, then your elbows, then maybe your groin. Hurts like hell but won’t kill you for a while.” He gestures with the gun. “Now, give me the disk.”

  “No.”

  “I killed people in Vietnam. I know how to use a gun, and I am not afraid to do it.” I remember the photo in his office, a much younger Wainwright in Marine dress uniform. I have no doubts.

  “You might be willing to shoot me,” I try, “but you won’t do it in the house, because there’s too much chance of leaving some forensic evidence.”

  Outside, crunches and crashes as everything is dumped against everything else. The hurricane is, incredibly, getting worse. But maybe the eye has passed over us and we are getting the back part of the wind.

  “I am perfectly willing to shoot you in the house,” Wainwright says calmly.

  “Then why haven’t you?”

  “Because that little bear might be another bluff. I am not about to underestimate you. You bluffed an expert in the cemetery. But we have talked enough. In thirty seconds, I am going to shoot off your kneecap, unless you give me the—”

  A tremendous crash rattles the house, stunning us both. Pictures fall from the walls, crockery shatters in the cupboards. Justice Wainwright, no New Englander, is startled. He does not know what I know: that the bone-jarring impact was the sound of the chimney, blown loose by the hurricane, falling over flat against the sloping roof. Wainwright automatically looks up, alarm on his face, perhaps wondering whether the whole house is coming down.

  The moment he is distracted, I dive, still clutching George Jackson, through the kitchen door and out into the storm.

  CHAPTER 63

  THE WATER BABY

  THE KITCHEN DOOR opens onto a wooden stoop leading down into the tiny, pitted strip of browning grass that passes for a back yard. I leap down the steps and land with both feet in the marsh that the yard has become. I splash around the corner into the narrow alley that runs along the side of the house toward Ocean Avenue. I know Wainwright will follow me, because he has no choice, and I also know that my plan to use the hurricane has backfired in the worst way: I
can run and shout as much as I want, but, even if I could be heard above the storm, there is nobody, not even a police officer, around to help.

  For a moment, I am startled, almost overwhelmed, by the sheer majestic size of the angry clouds swirling low in the sky. Then I hear a gunshot smash into the side of the house next door, and I get my feet moving. Wallace Wainwright may be firing wildly, but that is bound to change, and I know too little about guns to figure out how many bullets he has.

  Move!

  My Camry, with its sparkling new rear bumper, sits parked on the verge, useless to me, because my keys are inside the house, in the pocket of my jacket. As I dart across the street, I hear Wainwright shouting and cursing somewhere behind me, but I dare not look back. He has nearly all the advantages. He has a rain slicker and a hat, while I am wearing sweats that are already sticking to my skin. He is wearing boots, and I am wearing sneakers that are already sloshing with water. He has a gun. I have a bear.

  Emphasizing the point, a bullet thwangs off the pavement behind me. He is finding the range.

  I have two advantages of my own, I remind myself as I slosh my way across the park, where the ground is saturated and water is simply collecting, nearly an inch deep, on the grass. One is that, ever since I was small, I have loved being outdoors in the weather when a storm strikes, at least on the Vineyard; my mother used to call me her water baby. My second advantage is that I am three decades Wainwright’s junior. On the other hand, I have been shot a good deal more recently than he has, and I do not have my cane.

  In the middle of Ocean Park, a gust of wind knocks me flat against the white bandshell, and, pressing away from the wall, I turn to look. Wainwright is a shadow in the storm, still negotiating the wooden rail fence lining the road, but he will soon gain on me, because I have few places to which to flee. I feel sutures separating, muscles freshly pulled. I am exhausted, my legs aching from the effort of this short run. Even as out of shape as I am, I should be able to keep well ahead of the aging Justice. Unfortunately, my leg has not yet recovered from Colin Scott’s bullet, and I am hobbling, slowing inexorably as the trembling ache spreads outward from my wounded thigh.