Special Topics in Calamity Physics

by Marisha Pessl

  She and Gracey couldn't be together for security's sake; they were still wanted by the Feds and thus it was crucial to cut off all contact, reside on opposite sides of the globe. Or else, their romance had gone flat as uncapped Pellegrino; "The shelf life of any great love is fifteen years," wrote Wendy Aldridge, Ph.D., in The Truth About Ever After (1999). "After that you need a serious preservative, which can seriously harm your health."

  The resounding belief was that, even today, Nachtlich was alive and well. (Littleton supported this claim though he had no evidence. Dad was more skeptical.) "Thanks to inspirational recruitment," wrote Guillaume on www.hautain.fr, "they have more members than ever. But you can't go and join. That's how they remain unseen. They choose you. They decide if you're suitable." In November 2000, an executive at the center of an accounting fraud, Mark Lecinque, had unexpectedly hanged himself at his family home twenty minutes north of Baton Rouge, a pistol—fully loaded, apart for a single bullet—was found on the floor next to him. His apparent suicide was a shock, because Lecinque and his lawyers had acted smug and haughty when interviewed on network television. It was thus whispered his death had been the vigilante work of Les Veilleurs de Nuit.

  Other countries, too, claimed similar silent assassinations of bigwigs, magnates, industrialists and corrupt officials. The anonymous editor-in-chief of www.newworldkuomintang.org wrote that between 1980 and the present, more than 330 moguls in thirty-nine countries, including Saudi Arabia (men with a combined net worth of $400 billion) had been "quietly, efficiently disposed of" thanks to The Nightwatchmen, and though it was unclear if such sudden deaths actually benefited the downtrodden and oppressed, at the very least, it sent corporations into a temporary state of upheaval, forcing them to focus immediate attentions on resolving internal leadership problems, rather than looking outward to the land and people they might sacrifice to turn a profit. Countless employees also started to complain of a steep decline in productivity in the years following the death of the CEO or various trustees— what some referred to as a "never-ending bureaucratic nightmare." It was nearly impossible to get any work done or for anyone to make a final decision, because so many managers from different departments were required to sign off on the tiniest of ideas. Some Web sites, particularly those out of Germany, suggested members of Nachtlich were employed as supervisors at these behemoth conglomerates, their aim being to fan the flames of inertia by means of endless mandatory paperwork, circuitous checks and balances and labyrinthine red tape. Thus, the corporation, day after day, burning millions in what was becoming an endless waiting game, would "slowly eat itself from the inside out" (see www.verschworung.de/firmaalptraume).

  I liked to believe Nachtlich was still active, because it meant Hannah, during her monthly trip to Cottonwood, had not been collecting men like they were tin cans she'd hoped to recycle as we'd all believed. No, she'd been engaged in prearranged encounters, "private one-on-ones" intended to appear like seedy one-night stands, while in fact, they were a platonic exchange of vital information. And perhaps it'd been Doc, sweet Doc with his relief-map face and retractable trellis legs who'd informed Hannah about the recent movements and probing inquiries of Smoke Harvey and following that rendezvous—the first week of November—Hannah decided she had to kill him. She had no choice, if she wished to preserve her former lover's hiding place in Paxos, his sanctum sanctorum.

  But how had she done it?

  It was the question that stumped Ada Harvey, but after reading about the other Nachtlich assassinations, I could now answer it with my eyes closed (also with a little help from Connault Helig's Machinations Idyllic and Unseen).

  If rumor could be believed, The Nightwatchmen, following their post-January 1974 creed of invisibility, employed correspondingly traceless murder techniques. Their repertoire had to include something akin to "The Flying Demoiselle," described in The History of Lynching in the American South (Kittson, 1966). (In my opinion, Mark Lecinque of Baton Rouge had been killed this way, as his death was ruled a straightforward suicide.) They also must use another, more impermeable method, a procedure first documented by Connault Helig, the London surgeon summoned by a bamboozled police force to examine the body of Mary Kelly, the fifth and final victim of Leather Apron, commonly known as Jack the Ripper. A venerated, if furtive man of medicine and science, in Chapter 3, Helig details at length what he considers to be "the only flawless stealthy execution that exists in all the world"

  It was flawless because technically it wasn't murder, but a calculated setup of fatal circumstances. The plan was executed not by one person, but by a "consortium between five and thirteen like-minded gentlemen," who each, on the chosen day, independently committed an act assigned by the central planner, "the engineer" (p. 21). Viewed individually, these acts were lawful, even ordinary, and yet in a concentrated period of time, they combined to elicit a "perfectly lethal state of affairs, in which the intended victim has no choice but to die" (p. 22). "Each man acts alone," he writes on p. 21. "He does not know the faces, actions or even the final aim of those with whom he operates. Such ignorance is imperative, for his lack of knowledge maintains his virtue. Only the engineer will know the design from inception to end."

  Detailed knowledge of the victim's personal and professional life was mandatory, in order to effectively isolate the "ideal poison" to facilitate the "slaying" (pp. 23-25). It could be any possession, weakness, physical handicap or idiosyncrasy of the doomed individual—a cherished gun collection, perhaps, the steep flight of stairs outside Belgravia townhouse (which became "startlingly slippery in the wee hours of a brisk February morning"), a secret affinity for opium, foxhunting upon skittish stallions, hobnobbing under rickety bridges with disease-ridden streetwalkers or most conveniently of all, a daily dose of medication prescribed by the family physician—the concept being that all weapons utilized against the prey were his/her own, and thus the death would appear accidental to even the "craftiest and most inventive of investigators" (p. 26).

  This was how Hannah had done it—rather, how they'd done it, because I doubted she'd acted alone at the costume party, but had a number of ghouls to assist her, most of them conveniently wearing masks—Elvis: Aloha from Hawaii, maybe; he'd looked squinty eyed and suspicious, or the astronaut Nigel and I had overheard speaking Greek to the Chinese woman in the gorilla suit. ("Membership expanded not only in America but internationally," reported Jacobus on www.deechtewaarheid.nl.)

  "The primary gentleman, whom we shall hereafter refer to as One, will prepare the poisons prior to the day in question," Helig writes on p. 31.

  Hannah had been One. She'd ingratiated herself with Smoke, pinpointed his poisons: his blood-pressure medication, Minipress, and his favorite booze, Jameson, Bushmills, maybe Tullamore Dew ("He liked his whiskey . . . I won't lie about that," Ada had said). According to www.drug data.com the medicine was "incompatible with alcoholic beverages," and when combined, the individual may suffer the effects of "syncope," dizziness, disorientation, even a loss of consciousness. Hannah herself had acquired the drug—or perhaps she'd had it already; perhaps that nineteen-bottle stash of prescription pills in her bedroom cabinet was never for herself, but for her hit jobs. She pulverized a predetermined quantity (the exact amount of the daily dosage, so the elevated levels of the drug discovered in the autopsy could be easily explained in the absence of other signs of foul play; the coroner would assume the victim accidentally took his dosage twice on the day in question). She dissolved the powdered drug into the alcohol and served it to him when he arrived at the party.

  "One," writes Helig on p. 42, "is accountable for relaxing the victim, ensuring his defenses are down. It may serve the group well if One is a person of great physical beauty and charm."

  They passed Nigel and me on the stairs, went to her bedroom, talked, and shortly thereafter, Hannah excused herself, maybe under the guise of getting them another drink, taking both glasses with her, heading downstairs to the kitchen, rinsing them out in the sink, destroying the
only piece of incriminating evidence in the entire plot—and so concluding what Helig designated the initial setup, "The First Act." She never returned to him for the rest of the night.

  The Second Act comprised the seemingly random relay race that "gently guides the man toward his own conclusion" (p. 51). Hannah must have known Smoke would wear the olive-green Red Army uniform, and thus the assigned individuals knew not only his physical description but also what costume to watch for. Two, Three, Four, Five (and I wasn't certain how many there were)—they appeared at prearranged locations, approaching him, introducing themselves, handing him another drink, chatting breathlessly as they escorted him from the bedroom, down the stairs, outside onto the patio, each of them bold, engaging, ostensibly drunk. Perhaps one or two of them were men, but the majority were women. (Ernest Hemingway, who wasn't keen on the fair sex, wrote, "a young dame with pretty eyes and a smile can make an old man do just about anything" [p. 278, Journals, Hemingway,

  This carefully choreographed relay continued for an hour or two until Smoke was positioned by the edge of the pool, his face swollen and red, his eyes unable to pick themselves up off the scales and angel wings and dorsal fins to see where he was standing. His head was a bag of feed for chickens. That was the moment Six, standing in a group, bumped into him, making him lose his balance, fall, and Seven —Seven must have been one of the rats playing Marco Polo —made certain he was helpless, if not holding his head under water, then simply ensuring he splashed, drifted to the opposite end of the pool, the deep end, and was left alone.

  And so the victim dies, completing the Second Act, "the most noteworthy Act of our little tragedy" (p. 68). The Third Act begins the moment the body is found, ending with each implicated person "dispersing into the world like the withered petals off a dead flower, never to come together again"

  (p. 98).

  I rubbed my eyes after scribbling this last bit into my CASE NOTES (now occupying twelve pages of a college-ruled legal pad), threw down my pen and pressed my head into the back of Dad's office chair. The house was quiet. In the lone window by the ceiling, darkness clung like a flimsy nightgown. The wood-paneled wall, where my mother's six cases of butterflies and moths had once hung, stared back at me, expressionless.

  Remembering old Smoke Harvey, shadowing him through the costume party, his Long Night's Journey into Death — it rained all over the parade of secret revolution against corporate greed.

  That was the problem with causes, the cheap toy within their Happy Meal; inevitably, there came a point when they looked exactly like their enemy, when they became what they fought so hard against. Freedom, Democracy—the big breathy words people shouted with their fists in the air (or else whispered, wimpy looks in their eyes)—they were beautiful mail-order brides from far-flung countries, and no matter how long you insisted they stick around, when you actually took a good look at them (when you stopped feeling woozy in their presence), you noticed they never actually fit in; they barely learned the customs or language. Their transplant from a textbook into the real world was slipshod, rickety at best.

  "Just as no imposing character in a book may be cleverer than its minuscule author," Dad remarked in his lecture "Landlocked Switzerland: They're Nice and Neutral Only Because They're Tiny," "no government can be greater than its governors. And provided we're not invaded by Little Green Men any time soon —reading a week's worth of The New York Times, I'm not so sure that'd be a bad thing—these governors will always be mere humans, men and women, cute little paradoxes, forever capable of astounding compassion, forever capable of astounding cruelty. You'd be surprised— Communism, Capitalism, Socialism, Totalitarianism—whatever ism it happens to be doesn't matter all that much; there will always be the tricky balance between the human extremes. And so we live our lives, make informed choices about what we believe in, stand by them. That's all."

  It was 9:12 P.M. and Dad still wasn't home.

  I turned off his computer, returned the copy of Federal Forum and the other books to the bookshelf. Gathering together my notes, I switched off the study lights and hurried upstairs to my room. I threw the papers on my desk, took a black sweater out of my closet and pulled it over my head.

  I was going back to Hannah's. And I had to go, not tomorrow, not in the bleaching daylight that killed everything, made it laughable, but now, while the truth was still squirming. I wasn't finished. I couldn't tell anyone about my theory now. No, I needed something else, physical evidence, facts, papers — Minipress in one of those nineteen prescription bottles, a photograph of Hannah and George Gracey hand in hand or an article from The VallarmoDaily, "Policeman Shot, Woman Escapes," dated September 20, 1987—something, anything that would handcuff Hannah Schneider to Catherine Baker to Smoke Harvey to The Nightwatchmen. I believed it, of course. I knew Hannah Schneider was Catherine as surely as I knew a turtle could weigh a thousand pounds (see "Leatherback Turtle," Encyclopedia of Living Things, 4th ed.)- I'd been with her in her living room and on the mountaintop, painstakingly collected those splinters of her Life Story she'd scattered on the ground. Td always suspected something beautiful and grotesque lived in her shadows, and now, finally, here it was, shyly inching out of the gloom.

  But who'd believe me? Lately, my average of persuading others of my beliefs was around zero for eight. (I'd make an appalling missionary.) The Blue-bloods thought I'd killed Hannah, Detective Harper thought I had Witness Traumatization and Dad seemed to be deathly afraid I was soft-shoeing into madness. No, the rest of the world, including Dad, needed proof to believe in something (it was a crisis the Catholic Church faced with its rapidly diminishing numbers) and not the kind of proof that was a faint shadow darting through a doorway, a hiccup on the stairs, but proof like a stout Russian schoolmarm standing directly under a floodlight (and unwilling to budge): three chins, frantic gray hair (barely pacified by bobby pins), a big orange skirt (under which an adult orangutan could hide fully undetected) and a pince-nez.

  I'd find this proof if it killed me.

  As soon as I finished tying my shoes, however, I heard the Volvo cruising into the driveway—a snag in my plan. Dad would never let me go to Hannah's now, and by the time I'd explained everything, fielded every one of his tenacious, sticky questions (trying to convince Dad of something new, one had to be outfitted like God in Genesis), the sun would be rising and I'd feel as if I'd just fought off a Giant Squid. (I'll admit, too, even though I felt I'd proved it satisfactorily, I was nevertheless afraid that, unlike the Boltzmann Constant, Avogadro's Number, Quantum Field Theory, Cosmic Inflation, my feeble premise could very well collapse within twenty-four hours. I had to get moving.)

  I heard Dad enter the front door, chuck his keys onto the table. He was humming "I Got Rhythm."

  "Sweet?"

  Wildly, my eyes veered around the room. I ran to a window, unlatched it, heaved the thing up with all my might (it hadn't been opened since the Carter Administration), then the rusty screen. I stuck my head out, looked down. Unlike a clammy family drama on network television, there was no mighty oak with ladderlike branches, no lattice, rose-garden grill or well-situated fencing—only a three-story drop, a sloping ledge above the bay window in the dining room and a few feeble strands of ivy clinging like hair to a sweater.

  Dad was playing messages on the answering machine, his own, about dinner with Arnie Sanderson, then Arnold Schmidt of The New Seattle Journal for Foreign Policy who spoke with a lisp and slurred the last four digits of his phone number.

  "Sweet, you upstairs? I brought home some food from the restaurant."

  Hastily, I slipped on my backpack, swung one leg out the window, then the other, awkwardly sliding onto my elbows. I dangled there for a minute, staring down at the shrubs far under my feet, noting I could very well die, at the very least, break both arms and legs, maybe even my back, end up a paraplegic—then what sort of crimes would I be able to solve, which of Life's Great Questions would I ever answer? It was a moment I was supposed to wonder if it Was Worth It
, and so I did: I wondered about Hannah and Catherine Baker and George Gracey. I pictured Gracey in Paxos, then as rawhide holding a margarita by an infinity pool, the ocean jaded in the distance, skinny girls fanning out on either side of him like celery sticks on a dip tray. How faraway Jade and Milton had become, and St. Gallway, even Hannah — her face was already receding like a set of history dates I'd crammed into my head for a Unit Test. How lonely and absurd one felt dangling out a window. I took a giant breath, opened my eyes —I wasn't the sort of drip who closed her eyes, not anymore; if this was my last moment before total paralysis, before it all went haywire, I wanted to go down seeing it: the huge night, the grass shivering, the headlights of a passing car scissoring through the trees.

  I let go.

  32

  "Good Country People"

  The bit of roofing jutting out like stiffened, hair-sprayed bangs over the dining room's bay window braced my plummet to the earth, and

  though my entire left side was scratched by the side of the house and the rhododendrons in which I landed, I stood up, brushed myself off, remarkably unscathed. Obviously, I now needed a car (if I risked creeping through the front door for the Volvo keys, I risked encountering Dad) and the only decent place that came to mind, the only person who might help was Larson at the BP gas station.

  Twenty-five minutes later, I was dinging into the Food Mart. "Look who's come back from the dead," announced the intercom. "Beginnin' to think ya bought a car. Beginnin' to think you didn't like me."

  Behind the bulletproof glass, he crossed his arms and winked at me. He wore a black T-shirt with the sleeves cut off that read, CAT! CAT! Next to the batteries stood his latest girlfriend, a string-bean blonde in a short red dress eating potato chips.