The
Book of Forbidden Words
by John MacBeath Watkins
Table of Contents
Ch. 1 -- The Book & The Flame Pg. 3
Ch. 2 – A New Marriage Pg. 8
Ch. 3 – A Fish Who Worships Fire Pg. 14
Ch. 4 – A Huge Shadow Cast by a Small Man Pg. 24
Ch. 5 – The Legion of Strangers Pg. 33
Ch. 6 – The Woman With the Tattooed Eyes Pg. 54
Ch. 7 – A House for Mr. Silas Pg. 67
Ch. 8 – The Blue Peter Pg. 81
Ch. 9 – A Piece of Paper Pg. 96
Ch. 10 – A Bump in the Night Pg. 109
Ch. 11 – A Distant Voice Across the Water Pg. 125
Ch. 12 – For a Few Heartbeats More Pg. 134
Ch. 13 – A Night on the River Styx Pg. 143
Ch. 14 – Too Subtle for my Ken Pg. 156
Ch. 15 – More Sensitive than Anyone would Guess Pg. 166
Ch. 16 – My Lover on my Mind Pg. 179
Ch. 17 – A Reader of the Book Pg. 195
Ch. 18 – Astounded. Bemused. Confounded. Insensate, even. Pg. 214
Ch. 19 – Dry Eyes Crack and Up Come Weeds Pg. 230
Ch. 20 – A Stupidity Theory of History Pg. 240
Ch. 21 – Just a Short-Order Cook from Hell's Kitchen Pg. 253
Ch. 22 – The Parts to Omit Pg. 273
Chapter 1
The Book & the Flame by John MacBeath Watkins
"Henry Greathead?" The man who loomed over my table was tall and stooped, with hooded green eyes, thinning white hair and a shabby but once expensive suit. A suit at a ski resort. It was late afternoon, and large slow flakes of snow fell outside the restaurant, softening the shapes of trees and cars outside.
"You have the advantage of me, sir. Might I inquire what you call yourself?" I knew he wouldn't tell me. They never do.
"You realize I could compel you to leave?"
"I think you rather like being tracked," I remarked. "It must be lonely, the life you live." "A quiet life of scholarly pursuit. Ordinarily, I have no complaints." He carried a satchel with his copy of the Book in it. It was a meter from my hand. I had never been closer to the Book before. I took a sip of my grappa and tried to remain calm.
"You could compel someone to give you a better suit," I commented. "This one is warm enough, and I have no need to impress anyone."
I wanted to make a grab for the Book, but it would have been futile. A few words from him, and I would give it back. I would have thought there was no other course.
"May I see it?" I had been pursuing the Book of Forbidden Words for more than 20 years, and had met its Readers, but never seen a copy.
be restricted to scholarship. The Readers have no loved ones. Study of the Book can give them some control over the structure of human thought, but it subjects the mind to wracking strains. Only one who is completely self-involved can ride its forces, like a cork in a storm at sea. To get attached to anything or anyone is to risk being torn apart. Their only attachment is to the Book, and they will die for that. The one person they need is an acolyte to keep the Book alive and to learn its many secrets.
Looked at one way, we exist only to pass on our genes. All our striving against each other, the loves and triumphs of our lives, are just a way for the genes that program our behavior to get themselves reproduced. The Book of Forbidden Words uses Readers that way. They know it and accept it. Because of the way it isolates its Readers, the Book could not spread widely, or the species it needs to exist would die out. It relies on affecting a few people deeply, rather than many slightly. The Readers willingly sacrifice emotional attachments and all chance of home and family. They exist to understand the Book, to teach it, to extend its scholarship. Knowledge is their God, and study of the Book is their worship.
The young science of memes might one day comprehend the power of the Book. Memes are strings of information that propagate themselves through our minds. Everyone knows why the chicken crossed the road, but no one needs to know. That string of words continues to infect new generations without purpose or harm. Other memes are less benign. When 'The Sorrows of Young Werther' was published, a wave of suicides swept through Germany. Goethe surely did not mean to kill off a generation of depressed German teens, but something about his book turned the key that opened the door to death for them.
The Book of Forbidden Words is an ubermeme. It can help the Readers hook into memes in our minds, activating them and combining them to affect our thoughts. The Readers must constantly find ways to adapt the Book to changes in the web of meaning that forms the zeitgeist.
It is a meme itself, replicating slowly through the ages. It's power is an old one, and once embodied in text, that power gave the Book a life more persistent than any one human being or any one civilization. For a book collector, the Book of Forbidden Words is the ultimate prize. But no one has ever prized the Book away from its Readers.
To my surprise, the Reader pulled the Book out of his satchel and set it on the table. The covers were wood, oak by the grain, stained by who knew how many hands. The spine was thick leather and the Book had metal hinges. It hadn't always looked that way. It must have been rebound several times, pages had been torn and recopied. At some point it had been copied from another version, but copied with new notes and illuminations.
"How old?" I couldn't form any more of a sentence. "The text of the Book itself, or this copy?"
"This copy."
"Less than a thousand years. About Peter Abelard's time, I think. The binding's less than half that age."
The text varied in age, I knew. Parts were said to be in Etruscan, and only Readers of the Book could read those passages. Parts were older, parts were newer. The most basic texts were in hieroglyphics. Some were said to date from when the Sphinx still had a lion's head.
"Why…"
"Why am I showing this to you? Because I've reached a crisis. My health is failing and my acolyte's a disaster. This Book may not go on. I want it to live on in your memory, not in the way it would in mine, with an understanding of its secrets, but in that small way you've been striving for, where the Book is an object of envy for those who don't posses it. For a collector like you, its real power is not the point. It's the knowledge of that power and the possession of a fetishized commodity that makes the Book worth having for you. Few could read it without a
guide and understand it, and if they did, few could survive the way the Book changes one's mind. You know that, and desire the Book without desiring to read it. So you desire the Book not for its secrets but for itself.
"Yes, go ahead, touch it. You can even open the cover. I know what languages you've studied, and you'd be halfway through the Book before you got to the Greek and Latin you could understand."
My hands were sweating and I feared I would damage the fragile velum pages, so I put on a pair of gloves.
The old fool called the fat fool by his full name. He always starts with the full name. It shows he has a string to pull your soul. I'm never 'hey, you,' to him, always my name. Name, you will now commence your studies for the day, Name, that technique is not to be used for having sex with whom you choose, Name, we do not use the Book to make us rich, the Book itself is riches.
And now he's pulled the Book out, the holiest of holies, and set it on a table in a restaurant where people who came to a ski resort although they won't ski in even the best
conditions sit and drink coffee or liquor and eat those excessive Austrian pastries. Is he offering it to the fat fool? He's told me far too many times how horrible it would be for the Book to fall into the wrong hands, how we must be ready to sacrifice our lives, even, to keep it from falling into the wrong hands.
Only now he thinks my hands are the wrong ones. If I knew his name, I could compel him. He knows mine, so he can pull at my mind. He can make me forget the Book ever existed, if he wants to, I'm certain of that. I've got to act soon, or he'll put my knowledge where I can't get at it. Even if I don't get the Book away from him, I've got some of it in my head, and I can find another Reader who doesn't know me. I can get close, then get it away. They have no
notion of the power one could wield with the Book if one was willing. This one's willing, if the rest of them aren't.
"I think I see where this is going," I said softly, as if I were a virgin hunting a unicorn and didn't want to scare it off. "I knew a smuggler once, a great drinker, who sailed with loads of
marijuana from Latin America to ports in the U.S. When he decided it was getting too dangerous, he wanted to remember the good times but he didn't want to remember anything incriminating. So he went to a hypnotist and got her to convince him he didn't understand Spanish. It took three or four sessions, but now he remembers sailing to exotic ports, he
remembers being in the bar with all the others, but he doesn't understand what they were saying. He can't remember any introductions, he couldn't tell you what deals were made, but he
remembers the trip, and moving into the bordello, and roaring nights on equatorial streets, and the green flash as the sun sank below the horizon on a warm evening out on the Pacific. It's going to be something like that for your acolyte."
"If I can do my part correctly. He has the talent, that's the thing. If he failed to learn the languages, or didn't have the head for the strangeness of the Book, it would be easy to do as you say. But he's far more talented than I. The trouble is, he has no restraint. He would combine the power of the Book with power of more ordinary provenance, like money or political position. He likes power too well to handle it properly. His ambition would burn its way though the Book, and through cities and nations as well if I let him. I will keep the Book from him by whatever means I must."
He put the Book back in the satchel, and began to move off. I stood and followed (I could think of no other course.) We walked outside and up the hill to the station for the
by fit young men and women in form hugging ski suits. Some stared at him at first, but he smiled and gave each one a glance and they suddenly lost interest and started chatting with their neighbors. Some didn’t look at him at all, and I guessed one of them was the acolyte. I waved and walked back inside ( I could think of no other course) and went straight to my room where I at once fell asleep.
The next day I heard about the fire. The tunnel the tram went through had provided the perfect flue for a fire and not even bones were left. The metal tracks themselves were melted. No one at the resort could find words to talk about it, and no other topic lasted past a sentence or two. All were stunned and shocked, except, a waiter told me, one oddly cheerful man whose name no one could remember.
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Chapter 2 A New Marriage
A small white-haired man with an honest, open face and frank blue eyes sat by the pool at a resort in Trinidad talking to a tall, slender young woman with dark hair and an intense, restless manner. He wore loud Bermuda shorts and an aloha shirt, she cutoffs and a blue chambray shirt with the sleeves removed. Her limbs and cheeks were freckled. The old man lounged in comfort while she sat forward on the edge of a chair. For him, she was framed in shadow and leaves. Behind him she saw brilliant sunlight glaring off the pool's rippling water. Their argument was near its inevitable conclusion.
full," she said. "There's no need to delay.”
“If all the Book gave you was knowledge, you could proceed as rapidly as you desired, Nymue DuLac. But the Book changes your mind, and the human mind is not infinitely elastic. Best you let yours rest.”
True names were power in their world. She looked severely out at the pool. Best for him to think it was her real name.
The Book lay beside him in a satchel. It was never far from him. She sometimes dreamed of getting it from him. When he ended her session, she had been reading a section in which the calligraphy gave the text an unexpected character, and annotations and illuminations took her back to the Bronze Age. Even the texture and smell of the pages had been chosen for the atmosphere they created, the feelings they evoked. These things helped the Book's imagery seduce her into its world. The physical needs of her body might not have been enough to draw her out of it. She felt she was learning things from the text the old man had never understood, that no one had understood since the author had died millennia before. She had to know more, and know it now, but the old man's greater knowledge of technique made it easy to restrain her. "All right," she said, with a toss of long brown hair, "You win, you always do. I'm going inside, where at least it's air conditioned.”
The cutoffs and shirt were worn, the sandals as well, and she looked better attired for an archaeological dig (she had been on one when she met the old man) than for an earnest resort trying to attract the right sort. Except the eyes, of course. She looked as if she wore too much makeup, though in fact she wore none.
Up in their rooms, she saw the battered blue leather of the old man's copy of the Rubaiyat and thought that here, at least, was a book she could read all she wanted.
You know, my Friends, how bravely in my House For a new Marriage I did make Carouse:
Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed, And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse.
Fitzgerald had translated Khayyam as an Epicurean, cynical about learning and power but not about life or joy. Whether the old Persian mathematician had intended the poetry that way, or Fitzgerald had reinvented him, it was only Fitzgerald's translation that captivated the Western mind.
She was thinking about the difficulty of translating poetry while her thumb ran absently down the inside of the back cover. She wasn't searching for the book plate hidden between the endpaper and the cover, but curiosity was one of her qualifications as an acolyte.
The book plate was from the old man's father, formally presenting him on his twelfth birthday "an old book with much wisdom, from which I believe you are ready to learn.” The flyleaf at the front of the book was scarred where the book plate had been carefully removed. He had been careful enough to remove his name from prying eyes, but too sentimental to destroy his father’s note entirely. Too sentimental to be a Reader at all, really.
She carefully put the book plate back in place and put the book exactly as it had been. Then she went downstairs and approached him. He was drowsing, dreaming of the day he could lay down the burden of the Book and become an ordinary man.
"Merle Underhill, you deserve a rest, and I plan to see that you get it," she said gently, and with the techniques she had learned from him, she saw to it. He spent his next six days in a pleasant fog, from which he emerged refreshed and invigorated. An hour of this feeling was
followed by what felt like a winter of chagrin once he found she had taken the Book.
Finally she settled in Seattle. She liked the cool weather (it was by then late September) and knew that the city seldom saw snow. New clothing quite unlike her old clothes and a trip to the hairdresser for a change of color made her look like a different person. She enjoyed the bustle of an American city and on her breaks she would study the people on the street.
There was a tall, thin homeless man with a nose like a linoleum knife and a sinister curve to the brow. He was never drunk, and on those rare occasions when he spoke to someone, he was courteous and rational.
Perhaps because of his appearance or perhaps because of his diffident manner, he was hopeless as a beggar. She used skills acquired in a misspent youth to surreptitiously slip a twenty into the pocket of his jacket, but she could see that malnutrition and isolation were slowly
unhinging his mind. He was often muttering, and she supposed he was on the street because he was mentally unstable.
Then one day she went to an old film to clear her mind for further study. He was there, up on the screen, the villain of the piece. Stories and images were the meat of her study; she became fascinated by the way the stories this man portrayed conflicted with who he was.
One day she stood close behind him to listen to his mutterings. "I'll call it The Shabby Man Ages," he muttered.
"His jowls sag …"
It wasn't lunatic ravings at all. It was poetry, seemingly composed and spoken at the limit of a single breath, and it was about a bulky man with a determined expression and worn-out clothing who was standing across the street. And more so, it was about the homeless man who spoke it.
you are lost to me and the unbroken string of scholars who have perpetuated knowledge of the Book from ancient times. Remember this; truth is your God, study is your worship. The Book demands its price, and this is part of it."
But how could it hurt those legions of scholars if she cared about one person? It was not as if she was falling in love. She knew that would be the end of her, because the Book had made her vulnerable. But to help one isolated man, who in truth was not attractive at all, surely that could do no harm?
So easily we deceive ourselves. The trouble started because she wanted to care about someone. The homeless man’s need was his fatal charm. A masterful and confident man would have had no chance, a sweet and charming man would have found her armored against him. Only a hopeless man clinging to the edge of reality by his fingernails could have seduced her.
She could help him. In fact, she couldn't help herself.
But she is in no condition now to recount how she helped him or at what cost, though there is hope of a recovery, even hope that her star will shine brighter than before. Perhaps we should allow him to explain.
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Chapter 3
A Fish Who Worships Fire
haven’t been on speaking terms in years. I’ve told myself too many lies, called myself too many names.
My lips move, my voice murmurs but it’s not a conversation. I use the isolation of my life to compose elegies to strangers. I have no books, the library kicked me out for falling asleep when I got warm, and the people at the newsstand won't let me touch their merchandise. Except for newspapers salvaged from the trash, I have regressed to a preliterate way of life. For untold thousands of years before writing was invented, the great literature of cultures was passed on through a verbal tradition. Rhythm and rhyme made it possible for generations of storytellers to tell the great epics verbatim, and they enable me to remember the details of my life and help me overcome my great fear that hunger and isolation will destroy my mind.
No one touches me, no one speaks to me, except the cop who tells me to move on. It’s against the law in Seattle to recline upon the sidewalk, so I choose between slow steps from nowhere to eternity, or standing with the patience of a stork, or reclining against the law.
Some of you might recognize my face. It’s a bad face, a sinister face, a face that all humanity should oppose. When I was an actor my face was my fortune. On the silver screen I played villains, and my appearance alone was enough to make even the most lumpish and unsure actor look like a hero. I was a maker of stars, but consigned to the ranks of character actors myself. It was steady work, but not terribly well paid.
And now I don’t own my face. I spent time in a psychiatric hospital. While I was there, my mother had power of attorney to handle my business. Max Milligan, director of a play I had starred in, persuaded her to sell him the rights to my face. I can no longer appear on television or in films without his consent. Unfortunately he died intestate. With no will, there was no way to know who to ask for consent to use my face. The case could be in probate for years, and I have no resources to pursue a legal fight.
You could call me a visible man. Suppose you ceased to have corporeal existence. You somehow came to exist only in the imagination of those who saw you, a sort of reverse invisible man. People would see you, they would react as if you were there, but when they closed their eyes you would cease to exist. You would be unable to lift a teacup unless it were perceived that you could and should lift it, or even move without a sort of unconscious agreement with the people perceiving you.
You would be a sort of thinking dream, perhaps able to persuade the dreamer to let you walk through a door but unable to do it if they could not imagine it. If this happened to you, would you know it? Would any action you chose to take be unimaginable to those who knew you?
It happens all the time to politicians and other public figures. It happened to my friend Max. One night all the dreams of him were nightmares, and he flew from the roof of a building into the black oblivion of the pavement and freedom from the dreams that drove him. I still wonder whether it was my dream that killed him.
Does anyone dream of me? I wander alone, no one touching me, an image on the periphery of our consensual hallucination. I am homeless, in the old tongue I am a bum. I serve to remind people of the reasons for their compromises, their servitude, the suppression of their desires, the involuntary hours that steal away most of their lives.
I’m not the only dream. There are dreams of power, dreams of glory, dreams to drive their owners far to hard for them to bear. Their legs stride by with a purpose and punish the pavement with well-shod feet, pushing the earth in its orbit, serious business and money to be made as long as the legs don’t stop. Faces of stone and eyes like glass curtains, expressionless, efficient, impregnable, pass by my broken eyes and abandoned mouth and lazy, good-for-nothing teeth.
So I sit there on the sidewalk reclining against the law. I keep a sharp eye out for law enforcement and for people who seem somehow different. At the Public Market there are plenty of people to watch. Tourists and fishmongers, vegetable vendors and T-shirt brokers, arbitrageurs in used items and all the ordinary people of the city.
In a single breath I recite The Shabby Man Ages to assure myself that my mind is still intact.
His jowls sag, his belly swells
his dreams are crushed beneath the years and yet he faces every day
and doesn't let his mind dwell on slipping hopes and growing fears and failing eyes and still I say his courage holds up very well to walk among his desperate peers and face his fate down on the way.
It has been three weeks since I saw him, and I remember perfectly, so my mind must be intact. Or perhaps it's been three months.
An atavistic figure appears, waiting for the walk light. An administrative assistant, although she still calls it secretarial work. Nylons and makeup, impractical shoes and clothing that fits like sexual armor. She wears gray and pink and her life is stolen hour by hour by corporate dreams. (Or is she a spy in mufti, penetrating a closed world by adopting traditional costume? Her boss wears the businessman's burqa, suit and tie, to make himself
indistinguishable from other businessmen.) Something about her appearance is untrue. This isn’t who she really is, and I find the dissonance so tragic that I at once fall in love with her.
An Ode to a Secretary, then.
A secretary on a sidewalk has got to keep her guard up when she’s walking like a doe into a crosswalk
where strong trucks growl at a stoplight and pimps prowl with ladies of the night.
Down in those city caverns where the power lines hang like vines there’s a carnivore on every crosswalk,
a woman’s got to keep her guard up if she’s going to survive another block.
It takes a brisk step to keep them at bay, it takes a locked door at the end of the day to keep a woman safe from the city wilds and the sidewalk where a secretary’s perils lay.
(A locked door, what heaven would that be. A hot bath, a warm bed…but no, this isn't about me.)
The car is always too far…
And just then, when the walk light changes and she begins to cross, a swarthy man with a face like a wolf streaks by and thrusts his arm through the straps on her handbag and uses his momentum to sweep it from her grip. She looks at me. I am flooded with a feeling as if I am somehow one with her, closer than a lover, not quite as close as an internal organ. I have to rise as the bag snatcher speeds toward me; she is thinking I can block his path. As with almost everyone else since I lost control of my image, he sees me as peripheral, a figurative player with
no speaking part and no contact with the leading players. I weigh about as much as a moth, but my limbs are long and I might get in the way.
She reaches my arm out like a man hailing a cab and he runs right into it. With his Adam’s apple. I spin halfway `round and fall with him in an ungainly heap of limbs. When he rises again gasping, my leg has somehow become entangled in the straps of the handbag. The human wolf pulls at it, but I bend my knee and he can’t get it away. Running footsteps approach and he flees.
A forest of legs and a storm of voices surround me. “We got the sucker.”
“No, he got away.” “He’s right here.” “That’s somebody else.” “He’s got the handbag.” “He grabbed it with his leg?” “No wonder he tripped.”
Why do I try to be helpful? With my face, I always get blamed. A policeman enters the ring.
“Back off, people. Stand back.” He’s using that dog trainer voice they teach police to use to make people mind.
“Is this the bag, ma’am?"
She bends over and takes it. Her hair is permed like a helmet and dyed that artificial blonde that never fooled anyone.
“That’s it.” The bag is bigger than I realized, and heavy. It is red leather with stiff sides and a strap across the top with fastenings straining like a fat man’s belt. It looks like a way to
never be separated from her unabridged dictionary. I didn’t know then about the Book. “Will you press charges against this man?”
She doesn’t even look at me, not even to look through me. “No.”
“I can’t arrest him or hold him without your cooperation. You can bet this isn’t the only bag he’s snatched.”
She might say something in my defense. She of all people knows that I am innocent. “No.” I guess she means no cooperation, but in context it should mean that was not the only bag I’d snatched. I object.
“I almost got the bag snatcher. I got the bag back anyhow.”
“You have the right to remain silent,” the policeman says. His inflection indicates that this means I should shut up. He is a sturdy man about thirty, with a tendency to plumpness.
“But I didn’t grab the bag.”
“Ma’am,” the cop calls. “Now where did she go?” “Can I stand up?”
“Didn’t I bust you for sitting on the sidewalk?” “That’s why I want to stand up.”
The feeling is gone now, the oneness I felt with her. I am empty and alone, untouchable and cold. So I move my feet slowly like a penitent in chains, in my walk from nowhere to eternity. I should feel safer, the cop keeps watching me. And yet I feel exposed and long for escape.
The car is always too far, the bus takes too much time to come, and the eyes are always seeking her, the eyes of urban beasts
on the city streets where the bankers and the bikers and the bums strut and stumble and seek small openings in her fabric armor. A tear or a gap will give them a chance
give them flesh to feed the furtive glance that fixes now on the line of her calf, then takes in the shape of her ass.
(Or is it I who fear the piteous gaze of the ordinary man, or the clenched face of a woman who caught my eyes' quick scan?)
It takes a brisk step to keep them at bay it takes a locked door at the end of the day to keep a woman safe from the city wilds
and the sidewalk where the secretary’s perils lay.
Plenty of time to finish it later. Time for an epic poem. I will write it then forget it, then write it again. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity and shepherding the wind. I have no goal but to put one foot before the other, marching with that thousand-yard stare, hayfoot, strawfoot, like an inept soldier in a long lost war. I retreat from Moscow every day and leave my dead strewn in the snow bloodless and inert and unfit food for ravens. I must sit down, but the cop is watching, so I retreat from Moscow step by step, clayfoot, strawfoot, clayfoot, strawfoot, broken by a thousand defeats and desertions, glory gone and life ebbing.
Struggle never made me stronger It only made me weep
It only gave me broken dreams That hurt me in my sleep.
Where glasses clink and eyes link and whiskey fills the tumblers and ice melts and eyes melt she seeks someone to love her.
Her head turns like a lighthouse,
searching for herself in the eyes of an unmet lover.
When she was younger she had power, and beauty was its source. She’s survived a barren marriage and a bitter divorce,
and wonders if beauty has begun to decay and fears what the unmet eyes might say.
She watches the couples who merge more than dance to a slow-paced number.
They sway like the waves on the loneliest day in the life of a lighthouse keeper.
(Even knowing I’m not human in your eyes, I am still fool enough to fall in love with you.)
It takes a locked door at the end of the day (deadbolt and blinds drawn
until the coffee perks at dawn) to make the woman safe (night shut our, lights on
don’t know where the neighbor’s gone) from the city wilds.
At home to hear another voice she turns on the TV
It speaks of love and passion and dreams that will never be.
And when the moon is empty and when her tears wax round she dreams that sleep will take her to some quiet, private ground.
But of course, this isn't her. It’s only my dream of her, the dream of an undreamed man. Psychologists call it projective identification, seeing all our flaws in the face of another. No doubt she is loved and happy when bums aren’t watching her or fantasizing about her and wolf-faced men aren’t stealing her overcrowded purse. I know nothing about her, so the emptiness, despair, vulnerability and loneliness I have spoken of must be my own. It is I who fear the effect of my appearance. It is I who…she is far more real than I, and all her passions and problems are real. Only my own dreams lack substance, as do I. And any thoughts or feelings I may have about her matter about as much as a fish that worships fire. She’ll have no part of my world, and her world will have no part of me.
Chapter 4
It was several days before they found me. I was retreating under the eyes of the cop again when a hand, at last a hand, touched my shoulder and someone spoke.
“Silas.”
It was Albert Strange. I’d been introduced to him once when he was preoccupied with debriefing one of his agents. He was a broad, bald, bearded man with graying hair and powerful shoulders. He seemed preoccupied now as well, but I was to learn that this was a chronic condition. He always seemed to be thinking about the next thing, barely present in the present.
“Mr. Strange?” I wasn’t sure.
“Yes.” He looked me up and down, then seemed to look into my eyes while somehow not quite meeting my gaze.
“Would you like to work for me? I can offer a place to stay as well.” His voice was rough and gentle, strength restrained by kindness.
“I don’t know how to be a detective.”
“But you do know what someone looks like. I won’t fool you, I’m not offering a career. I’m not even offering to put you back on your feet.” There was another man with him, a mulatto with a genial, shrewd face wearing an expensive suit.
“It might only be a few days,” Strange said. “It looks like you have trouble getting indoors these days, getting a shower and getting your clothes clean. I could give you a respite from this life. And Carol’s working for me now. If you’d accept her help…”
“I won’t stay with Carol.”
“Stay with me then. We need you to identify someone. We’ll pay $15 an hour while you’re working. It will be sort of a stakeout, so how many hours I don’t know. Could be hours, could be weeks. If it’s weeks, think about the changes you could make. You won’t be paying rent until the job’s done, and I’ll feed you, so you can bank every dime. You could have a
month’s rent when we’re done.”
The genial man spoke as if I weren’t there. “Won’t he drink it all up?”
Strange turned to him. “Silas doesn’t drink.”
“I had champagne when Max’s play opened,” I reminded him. My avoidance of alcohol is a personal preference, not some kind of moral stand.
“Is that the only time in living memory you had a glass of wine?”
“Living, I guess, as long as I’m alive.” Max was gone, and Liza, my costar… who knew. Perhaps someone besides me remembered, but not them.
“This is Spender Bighouse,” Strange said, gesturing to the genial man. “He’s the client.” A hulking figure stood near the genial man. A bodyguard.
Bighouse reached a large hand to me and shook my grubby paw. “Glad to have you aboard,” he said.
He could not imagine me refusing. I would have to work for him.
Bighouse went to the office in a separate car, giving Strange time to brief me.
“Look, this Bighouse character is nuts, but he’s got money. He’s in publishing. Came up with that reference book, ‘Compared to What: The Book of Baselines.’ He put it all on line, sold it for big money during the dot.com bubble and now he's got all the money he needs.” Strange was driving a yellow bugeye Sprite through city traffic. There was no radio. I pictured him singing in order to have music in the car. He had a bigger car, I’m sure, so I assumed the selection of the Sprite was intended to keep me away from Bighouse.
thinks the key to how they operate is some special book. I wouldn’t touch a case like this if the firm didn’t really need the money. We got a lot of bad publicity about Phil Thibodeaux. It’s cost us a lot of business.” Thibodeaux had been a partner in the firm. He’d run a grow house on the side. The cops were still trying to find him.
“Sorry.”
“I should have caught him myself. It’s not like I know nothing about pot.”
We pulled into a parking garage. He parked and didn’t try to put the top up before leaving the car.
“The main thing is, don’t laugh in this guy’s face. He’s serious about this crap, and we only get paid to pursue his fantasy if he thinks we take him seriously.”
There was an uncomfortable silence in the elevator. In the entry to the agency, the receptionist didn’t smile. She gave all her attention to Strange, with a silent, serious look as if she expected him to tell her whether she would live.
“Has Mr. Bighouse arrived yet, Sadie?”
“He said he would wait in the conference room. He seems to be looking forward to your meeting.”
Strange nodded.
“This is Silas Night. He works for us until further notice.” She fastened her serious eyes on me. I had a feeling that fifty years later she would be able to spot me across a crowded room. She was small, olive-complexioned and skinny.
He led me into the conference room. Bighouse sat at the head of the table, his bodyguard hulking behind him. The bodyguard was a black man in a black suit, powerful but not tall.
“Have you told Mr. Night about the Book?” Bighouse asked. “Thought I’d leave that up to you.”
Bighouse templed his fingers and leaned forward.
“Allow me to share my obsession. Reading the Book, Mr. Night, would change you in ways you could not imagine. Even knowing about the Book has changed me, and might change you.
“Some say it first appeared in the time of Sumer. Others that it dates from the time of the Pharaohs. Because it is a written work, I’d give humanity some time to work on it. Say the flowering of Greek civilization or the early days of China. The Book was a secret so long, how can we know who wrote it or when?
“Whenever it was, it must have been back when northern Europe was a backwater. There are no European records of the book before the 12th century. It became a force in Europe at about the time the Bogomils came from Bulgaria. The East had nurtured its mysteries for centuries or millennia. And when the Book arrived, the Inquisition tried to crush it, with the tools of torture and Catholic guilt and the armies of Simon de Montfort.
“But everyone who read the book became immune to the powers of the Church and the state. Every time they were captured they slipped away, and they almost never were captured. They began to exert influence in subtle ways, and after a couple hundred years Europe ceased to be a backwater. Intellect began to reign, and the old ways, the witch burnings and the inquisition and the old superstitions all began to fade.
“What happened in the East, where the Book arrived from? Its influence faded, its practitioners must have disappeared. The Book carries its own price. I suspect that the followers of the way of the Book decided the price was too great to ask anyone to pay.”
“Like what? Eternal damnation?” I sounded cynical.
“It is a book, Mr. Night, not a religious totem. It does not summon the devil, if there is such a thing, which I do not believe. It does what books do. It changes your mind. It changes
the way you look at the world. It is a difference of degree, rather than kind. Has it never struck you what a peculiar thing a book is? Someone sits alone, manipulating a tool by hand, encoding a message on a page. Then, perhaps half a world away and a millennia later, you sit alone
decoding the message on a reproduction of the page and it creates an image in your mind. It may move you to tears, it may move you to action, it may even reshape your entire view of the world and cause you to change the course of your life. The peculiar nature of books escapes us
precisely because they so permeate our lives and because they so greatly shape our minds. Surely you have felt changed after reading a book sometime, as if you were a different person when you finished than when you started.”
“I think so.” I thought of Crime and Punishment, and maybe Heart of Darkness.
“Only an analogy can explain what happens. You know how you can recognize emotions in the face of another person? They say no other animal can do that to the extent we can, not even the other hominids. That’s the difference in level of functioning we’re talking about.
“The people of the Book have a change on the same scale in their consciousness. I don’t know what that change is, I only know that it gives them an advantage in life that we can’t understand. I suspect they use that part of the brain that used to carry the voices of the gods to speak to us. I'm not sure even they know how their minds are changed by reading the Book, but if they ask you for something, you'll comply. It's as though they've gained control of the very structure of human thought.
"Those who hold the Book have kept the changes to themselves. This may not be as selfish as it sounds. Not all the changes are benign. Perhaps a greater understanding of the human mind leads to a deeper knowledge of the sources of human pain, or maybe learning about life from reading rather than from living means they are steeped in the illusions about love, and respond to those instead of love itself. The keepers of the Book do not marry or have lovers, and
this seems to be a natural law, in that it requires no enforcement and no one breaks the law. Love has the power to bring us joy or to destroy us. It is said those who read the Book lose the
boundaries of their souls in love and have no defenses. You or I, Mr. Night, hold back enough to protect ourselves, and it is our resilience that makes us able to forget and forgive the inevitable painful incidents that every love affair must contain. Those who read the Book lose their ability to accommodate themselves to such ordinary shocks."
“So they died out like a tribe of bachelors," I interjected. He nodded.
“But now its influence spreads again, I am quite sure. Our lives are shaped by their learning and their talents. Tell me, why did you tackle the man who stole that woman’s purse?”
I couldn’t explain it to Bighouse.
“She looked at me. I knew I should stop him.”
Bighouse nodded as if that was the only thing I could have said.
“They have a way of making their wishes our own. I don’t think it is telepathy. More like empathy. Somehow they read what is in our hearts, and somehow their look, their gesture, communicates to us in ways we cannot communicate with each other.
“So I decided I wanted the Book. I won’t guide you through the labyrinthine process of acquiring it. I got it, and I was ready to read it. It was stolen from me. I hired a man to get it back. That is the man you stopped.”
I wondered if a man who declined to tell us how he came to own such a thing had ever in fact owned it, or if we were being hired to steal it.
“Why didn’t you get the police to get it back?” I asked.
“They couldn’t. When they were in the presence of the holders of the Book, they found themselves unable to act.”
“Who are they? These Book people, I mean.”
“I don’t know what they call themselves. Outsiders call them the Legion of Strangers.” “More importantly,” Strange interjected, “If the police aren’t able to act, how can you be sure that we can?”
“I only ask that you keep trying. I’m willing to pay you handsomely as long as you do that for me.”
“That's what we'll do. Now Silas, your only job will be to identify the woman who had the book. This agency does not grab bags. We will put Mr. Bighouse and his associates in touch with this woman, and he has pledged to use only legal means to recover his property. In any case, I’m sure it is by now clear that illegal means are futile.”
I guessed this was an effort to cover the agency when Bighouse eventually used his own methods and his own people to get the book.
“You’ll have your own man make another grab, won’t you?” I said, amused.
The bodyguard shifted in a subtle way, and I became aware of how he seemed to add to his employer’s bulk, like a huge shadow cast by a small man.
Bighouse smiled.
“Willie Lawrence was acting on his own behalf. His fantasy is that a creature such as himself could benefit from the gifts of the book. As if he could read and understand even a dictionary.” He hit the table. “I tricked her into exposing herself. I hired that simian little crook to watch her. And I suppose I chose an untrustworthy cat’s paw on this occasion.”
He swiveled his chair to look at his bodyguard and smiled. “Mr. Lawrence won’t be troubling us.”
He turned to me.
“I am an actor. I could hardly miss the plot points in your performance.”
“Bit heavy, you think?” he said brightly. “Well, I’m only trying to communicate
accurately. I’m glad you are not easily intimidated. If we understand each other, that’s enough. You can identify the woman Mr. Lawrence was watching. That is your entire value to me, Mr. Night. If you do that successfully, I will reward you beyond anything this detective agency pays. Fail me, and you have no more value than…” he looked down at the table and made a gesture of sweeping something off it… “a crumb.”
But didn’t he know that I had already been trampled into the carpet? And didn’t I already know the look of a foot coming down?
*****************************************************************
Chapter 5
The Legion of Strangers
After Bighouse left, Strange relaxed. He led me into his office.
“God, it’s hard not to shoot him down when he goes into his act.” Strange threw himself into his chair behind a large, blonde desk. “Did you catch that about the Legion of Strangers? That’s roughly the French name for the Foreign Legion. Legion d’Etranger. And the Bogomils? They were Manichaeans. That’s what started the Inquisition, the Church trying to make sure it wasn’t supplanted by the far less corrupt Manichaean faith of the Cathars. If this document exists at all, it’s probably a Manichaean religious tract. That would be of immense archeological
importance, since the only knowledge we have of that faith comes from those who suppressed it. I doubt it’s even that. Bighouse is probably just naming a little-know group to create an
atmosphere of mystery.”
“What happened to that religion? I thought you couldn’t kill an idea.”
“You can kill everyone who believes in it. You can even kill anyone who knows about it. The Church was far more effective than Bighouse gives it credit for being. For a while, the Manichaean faith survived among the Uigurs, but I believe there are no more Manichaeans.”
“What if they didn’t all die? What if some of them went underground? Could that be the basis for the story Bighouse believes?”
“You assume he believes it. I only assume he anticipates we will act as he wishes if he tells that story. What are his motives? If there are closeted Manichaeans, like the secret
Christians who continued to practice as if pursued long after Japan was reopened to the West, it would be a coup for him as a publisher to open this up and print their book. I’m assuming his motives are simpler. I’m guessing the item we’re searching for is valuable, and that he doesn’t want us to know what it is. It could be blackmail material about him, it could be trade secrets belonging to him or to a rival. If he needs to tell us a fairy story to protect himself from embarrassment, I’m okay with that. If knowing what that document is would make me turn down this job for legal reasons, well, I’m sufficiently determined to see the agency we’ve built here survive that I will not look too deeply into the motives of a client who is willing to pay us enough to keep us going. You know what? When people see that we didn’t die out when they expected us to, they are going to see us as more resilient and resourceful then they thought we were. Those are qualities that are admired in this business. This will help us survive. And we will survive.”
“Spender Bighouse. That’s not his real name, is it?” “It’s his legal name. It’s not the name he was born with.”
“It sounds like a name you’d choose if you were seven years old.”
“He was nearly thirty when he chose it. It was his second name change.” “Huh. Ever hear of Ishi?"
"There's a book like that, isn't there?"
"Native American. Last of his tribe in California. He came out of the bush after the rest of his tribe died off."
"Right. And his name was Ishi. So what's the point?"
"His name wasn't Ishi. See, Ishi just means 'man.' He never told anyone his real name because he thought that would give them power over him. And Bighouse, by changing his name, is concealing his real name. D'you suppose he thinks it gives people power over him?"
“Only if you also know date of birth, mother’s maiden name and social security number. No, I think he believes his name has power over people. That's how our culture works.”
“What name did he start with?” Strange laughed.
“Are you hoping this will give you power over him? I did check him out. His parents called him Jacob Whynott, and his father came from a long line of New England fishermen named Whynott. His father was white, his mother black. She came from Detroit. When he went to college, he became a leftist and changed his name to Nicholas Komradsky. He seems to have had a rather cartoonish notion of his identity, and when he decided to become a capitalist he chose the name of Spender Bighouse. He seems to like making his point with broad strokes. The first reference book he published was called the Book of Common Knowledge, and competed with books like the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. He lost that battle, perhaps
because the title implied that people should already know what was in the book.” “Whereas his later attempt, ‘Compared to What’…”
“Implied that your current knowledge was inadequate,” Strange finished. “A far better strategy.”
Strange told me I smelled too bad to be around the office. He took me to his condo, a place with too many books on too few shelves and no flat space uncovered.
“You’ll have to sleep on the couch. It doesn’t fold out or anything. I’ll get a plastic bag for your clothes. I’ll show you the laundry later. I’ll lend you some of my stuff. There will be room for two of you in one of my shirts, but that’s better than having them too small.”
It seemed like heaven. The warmth, the soft couch, and more than anything, a long, hot shower.
“It’s terrible, seeing you like this,” Strange said. “I knew you in a happier time. How many years has it been?”
“What year is it now?”
When he laughed, I laughed too, as if it had been a joke.
That night I was troubled by unsettling dreams of the sort that had never bothered me when I slept in doorways or concealed in the bushes of a park.
I was lying in a hospital bed with the unhealthy glow of fluorescent light and the gentle beeping of monitoring devices giving me a sense of mild unease. The face of the woman whose bag had been snatched moved over me, as if she was leaning over the bed. I looked in her eyes, and saw in their place patches of sky, and found myself falling into the sky, and shipwrecked on a
cloud, marooned, gazing down at a green field far below where she stood gazing up at me.
I felt pierced by the loneliness that comes only from missing someone in particular. But of course, there was no one like that for me.
I leaned down on a mossy log by a still pond in the forest. I looked down at my
reflection, floating translucently above the dark bottom. Out of the darkness another face rose up from the bottom, visible though my own reflection until it broke through the surface. It was her face, but below her eyebrows there was skin, tattooed with pictures of eyes. The tattooed eyes were sad and kind and questioning. I felt that she wanted me to love her. Her lips opened gently as if to call my name and she screamed in a way that spread panic through me as if I had been struck by lightening.
I woke on that one with my heart pounding. The room was quiet except for the
anachronistic ticking of a mechanical clock. I visited the bathroom and washed my face with hot water before returning to the bed.
I couldn’t sleep for half an hour. The images of approach and distance, of intimacy and fear must be about me and not her. It didn’t matter how warm the room or soft the bed, I could never be comfortable, never be approachable. If only I could just die and get it over with. I just couldn’t let the darkness win. Besides, no one imagined I would die. I didn’t have permission.
A room filled with golden sunlight. The Book lay on the table, ancient, thick and wise. It was bound in cracking leather and its pages were foxed and yellowed. It had survived wars and inquisitions, and much more difficult, it had evaded neglect and forgetfulness, changes in tastes and fashions. Some Ancient Greeks had feared that writing books would change the nature of
knowledge, make it impossible to pass on thoughts only to the soul of the right sort. The Book had defenses they never dreamed of, but sometimes someone must have read it who was not intended to read it. What happened to them? I felt myself moving toward the table, a reader with nothing to read, impelled peruse a perilous text. Was I a soul of the right sort? Was this the written knowledge the Greeks worried about?
I reached for the cover and gently began to open it. A slender hand restrained my own. I turned and saw the woman with the tattooed eyes. Panic began to rise in me. She smiled a slow and knowing smile, then gently kissed me on the lips. I felt peace spread through me. She took my hands and led me away from the book.
My next dream was about singing blimps. They formed a wall across the horizon, and Albert Strange danced with Sadie while the blimps sang old Anderson Sisters songs. I think they were doing the Lindy hop.
Strange woke before I did. I heard him clattering around the kitchen getting coffee. I wasn’t used to waking up warm. I didn’t want to leave the luxury of the couch. The smell of coffee filled the room and I could hear Strange getting cups from the cupboard.
He entered the living room and put a cup on the coffee table next to me. “What are you waiting for, Sleeping Beauty, a kiss?”
I swung myself up to a sitting position and took the cup in both hands, though I didn’t really need the heat for once.
“Sleep well?”
“Weird dreams.” That seemed ungrateful. “But it was great being warm. I feel stronger.”
“This woman. Who is she?”
“One of them. One of the people who read the Book.” “So isn’t it really hers?”
“That’s between her and Bighouse. He claims he bought the book, and she stole it. He claims not all members of this cult have copies of the Book. She wanted her own and couldn’t get it from official channels. He says maybe she wants to read parts of it that she’s not permitted to read yet. Hell, I don’t know. I'm betting it's really a folder of blackmail photos. We can’t ask her if it's any of these things unless we find her.”
“What if Bighouse is lying?”
“Keeping the agency on the right side of the law is more important than the money we get from him. Don’t worry, if we find out Bighouse is pulling a fast one, we dump him. If he’s doing something illegal, we turn him in.”
If we find out. I wondered how hard he would try to find out whether he should refuse the rich man’s money.
We worked out where she might be. I was to work with Pete, a short, paunchy man who could be 30 or 40 and looked like no one would notice him standing in a spotlight. I would signal him if I saw her, so that he could follow her and learn where she lived and where she went. I was not to contact her or even look at her any more than necessary. Pete was the one who could follow people without being seen.
We set up shop at the newsstand at the Market. I bought a copy of the New Yorker and stood there reading it. Pete would stand a short distance away. Occasionally he would do a lap of the crosswalks, standing at each corner through a couple lights before proceeding on his way. At lunch I ate at a café that had a view of the sidewalk leading to the intersection where the bag
snatch had happened. Pete ate at a table closer to the door than mine.
About two in the afternoon he stood close to me and without acknowledging my presence said, “Stop looking over at me, Slim. You ain’t my type and it’s bad for business.”
I looked over at him, then quickly looked away and muttered, “Sorry.” I spent the rest of the day trying not to look at him.
Don’t think of a blue elephant. You thought of one, didn’t you? The rest of the day went like that.
We stuck it out until 7 p.m., then walked separately to the office. I was warming my hands on a cup of coffee when Strange stopped by. “How’d it go?”
Before I could answer, Pete’s voice came from behind me.
“Well, if the cop or the newsy or anybody else around there knows her and knows she might have someone looking for her, we’re made.” I hadn’t noticed him coming in.
“I guess I’m not a natural at this,” I confessed.
“Sure, you stick out like anything, but do you have to keep looking at me?”
“I don’t think it’s a problem,” Strange said. “I gather this target is an isolated person, part of a small but influential group that has better things to do than hang out on street corners.”
“Or even walk a regular route from work to lunch,” Pete said. “Don’t we know anything about her? Where she works, where she lives, friends, family?”
“That’s what we are supposed to be finding out. And since Willie Lawrence, who did this before, chose to work for himself and keep all the information to himself, the only lead we have is where she was seen before.”
“And Lawrence. Might be easier to find him.” It sounded as if Pete wanted an assignment that had nothing to do with me.
“I’m working that angle. Nothing so far. You two just keep doing this, every day until the day when she comes walking by. It takes patience, but I know you’ve got that.”
It was another hour before Strange was ready to take me back to his place. I was
surprised to see that the receptionist stayed until he left. When we got into the elevator I thought I would be between them, but she stood so close that I had to stand in front of them. They stood behind me close and wordless. When we got to the bottom, I stepped out and looked back. Strange looked like his mind was a week ahead. Sadie was trying not to think of a blue elephant. Or something nearer. We parted ways.
We were in the Sprite again. He loved that car. “Does Sadie have a thing for you?”
“Eh? No, women don’t find me attractive,” he asserted. “I’m not as fat as I once was, but I’m graying and balding and I have no life outside work.”
“Maybe it’s not what you look like or what you do that she likes.”
“How can anyone know anything about us other than our looks, our words and our actions? They see us, they hear us. What else is there to like? Our smell?”
“Maybe she likes your philosophy of life.”
“Which, actually, is ‘I took the road less traveled by. Now where the hell am I?’” “Mine’s ‘What would Judas do.’ I’ve played too many villains, and I’ve always looked to Judas for my motivation.”
There was a light, steady rain falling when we left the high-rise. Strange’s condo was on Dexter, overlooking Lake Union. He didn’t raise the top on the Sprite, and even with the new coat he’d bought me I was cold. I wondered whether the top worked.
“What happened to the hard top?” “Never had one for this car.”
“But I thought you had a car with a roof.” “Sure. No fun to drive, though.”
We pulled into the garage under his condo. I felt he expected me to break through his preoccupation.
“You don’t get lonely?”
“All the time. It’s the normal human condition.” “Did you ever want kids?”
“Would have been nice, if I’d lived that kind of life.”
“Kids carry on the name. Are you going to be the Last of the Stranges?”
“There’s no immortality in offspring. They live for themselves, not for their parents. We all live our lives then die alone. Most of us leave no trace. That’s okay. We’re all more ordinary than we think we are. Why should we be remembered?”
We’d reached the elevator. I had no more gambits to offer. “We’re taking the wrong approach,” he said.
“We could take the stairs.” “I meant about the case.”
“I’ve only been doing it for one day. I can do better.” He was silent for a moment. “Can I keep the warm clothes?”
“You’re still on the case. And yes, you can keep everything I provide you with on the job.” He looked at me as the elevator doors opened. “I’m going to put you back in the gutter, but just for appearances. We’ll get you some older clothes at the Goodwill. You won’t be as conspicuous as a homeless person as you are when you’re dressed well. Nobody wonders why a
bum is hanging around. When you wear the nice clothes, you look like you should be going somewhere.”
“How do you know? You weren’t there.”
“Yeah, I was. You weren’t supposed to see me, so you didn’t. I was there for about half an hour.”
If I hadn’t seen him, could I have missed my quarry? Strange was not a small man. We entered the condo and hung up our coats. I sat on the couch and relaxed, absorbing the heat. How could I have lived without it?
Strange poured himself a seltzer, then came and sat in a chair facing me. “Tell me Silas, why don’t you drink?”
“I did for a while. When I was drunk, I was the same as when I was sober, only clumsy. And I got headaches. Nothing in it for me.”
“Try drugs?” “A few.” “Same story?”
“Not all of them gave me a hangover. None of them made me any happier. I think other people react differently to drugs. I snorted coke and all that happened was my nose got numb. People devote their lives to snorting coke. There must be something in it for them.”
“You may be right. Somerset Maugham complained that he became so violently ill when he tried to drink alcohol that he could never consume enough to get the slightest effect. Terrible thing for a writer.”
“What about you?”
“I don’t keep any booze around. If it’s here, I drink it. If it isn’t, I don’t miss it. I don’t want to become a drunk out of boredom and loneliness.”
“Is that why detectives drink?”
“The ones that do generally do it for that reason.” “Sadie would take care of you.”
“Will you stop ribbing me? She’s fifteen years younger and extremely attractive. She can do better than me.”
“So check out some singles’ ads. Find someone old and unattractive, if that’s your type.” “’I have heard the mermaids singing each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.’”
“That’s from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ isn’t it?” “Yup.”
“Have you memorized the whole thing?” “Nope.”
“Why not?”
“That would be pathetic.”
“Chicks dig guys that quote poetry.”
“I assume the out-of-date slang is intended to convey irony.” “Try it on Sadie.”
“Any further ribbing will get me to respond in recommendations that you will find anatomically impossible.”
“You’re right about her being attractive. Do you think she could go for a man who works in dirty longjohns and a down vest that smells like a dead yak?”
“Anatomical impossibility number one…”
dragging the latter through the dirt to give it the right patina.
This time I had nothing to read. It was the retreat from Moscow all over again. About 11 a.m. I spotted a familiar face. I signaled Pete. He shook his head in disgust.
He wandered unobtrusively closer. “That’s no lady.”
“No. It’s the guy who snatched her bag. Willie Lawrence. I thought Bighouse was supposed to have eliminated him.”
“If I stand next to you any longer he’ll make us. If he hasn’t already.” “Don’t you think we should follow him?”
“That ain’t the job.”
He walked away, shouting "Get a job!" over his shoulder. Lawrence hung around for another four hours. He was obviously doing the same thing I was. He didn’t seem to notice me.
When we headed back to the office I was beginning to feel discouraged. How long would this go on? Pete was satisfied to do this every day as a profession. I was making good money at this, but I couldn’t see myself doing it for long enough to afford an apartment. Pete didn’t walk back to the office with me.
When I got off the elevator on the floor where the office was located, I decided to wait for the next one. I figured Pete would be on it, and I wanted to catch him coming in.
I only had to wait about 90 seconds. When the doors opened, I was smiling my most triumphant smile.
Only it wasn’t Pete. It was Willie Lawrence.
You could say he looked surprised. He looked like a man about to use his trousers as a mobile latrine.
Lawrence had unfrozen himself and was frantically pushing the “close door” button. “Stop him!”
The bodyguard responded to Bighouse’s command, but didn’t quite manage to get his hand in the door before it closed.
“Did you get a good look at him?” Bighouse asked the bodyguard.
“No, Mr. Big.” His voice was a soft tenor, his accent from somewhere in Africa. Bighouse turned to me.
“Go with Jones. Track him down.” He expected me to go, so I went.
Jones and I went down on the elevator. We both stayed silent. We checked out the lobby, then went down to the garage level where a black Lincoln Navigator awaited us. We drove around the streets downtown at random, me scanning the pedestrians, Jones just navigating traffic.
“Is Jones your real name?” “No.”
“So what’s your name?”
“You just call me Jones. I like Jones.” “You like working for Bighouse?”
“I was driving a cab before. This is more money, less work.” “How did you get the job?”
“He got in my cab. I talked to him.”
“You must have a pretty good line of patter.” The sun had set and I was watching people in the streetlights.
Only he gave me what you call it, the booby prize. He gave me a better job driving.” “What was the book?”
“Novel.”
“Was there a cab driver in it?” He laughed.
“Same question Mr. Big asked me. When I said yes, he said I didn’t need to show him the book. He said everybody who thinks they can write tries to write a book about someone like themselves, and this is always a bad book.”
“So Conrad should never have written books about mariners? Twain should never have written books about boys growing up on the Mississippi? Hemingway should never have written a book about an ambulance driver in World War I?”
He was quiet for a time.
“Next time, could you talk to him?”
“I have no influence. But maybe you shouldn’t give up on yourself.” “Thank you.”
“I’m not finding our man.” “That’s okay. I like to drive.”
He seemed happy, so I kept scanning pedestrians. The quiet, happy presence of the bodyguard made it easy to pass the time. Maybe he had been chosen for this, rather than his menacing appearance. We were out there for an hour.
When we returned, Sadie ushered us into a conference room. Strange, Bighouse, Pete and a man I hadn’t met were already there. Jones went to stand behind his boss.
“Report,” Strange commanded.
if that was the proper form for a report. It sounded like one a five-year-old might have made. “Willie did have some skills,” Bighouse said. “You shouldn’t blame yourself.” He clearly was doing it for me.
“You said he wouldn’t trouble us.” It was what the others expected me to say. “Yes,” he said, turning to look at Jones, “I did.”
I could imagine him ordering his menacing bodyguard to do something awful to
Lawrence, and Jones having an attack of kindness at a critical moment. He was looking straight ahead, meeting no one’s eyes.
Pete spoke up.
“I followed you, Silas. When we knocked off work. I figured if you’d been made, you might be a target.”
“Thanks.”
“So I figured I might get a break if I saw who attacked you.” “Oh.”
“I saw this weedy character you’d pointed out following you, and being pretty damn obvious about it. I marked him, followed him into the building and slipped into the same elevator. When the doors opened on our floor, you were waiting. He pushed the close button and went down. I let him get out and waited for the doors to almost close before I pushed the door-open button and got out. He didn’t notice me following, but he must have been really spooked, because he was running. I can keep up with most people, but this guy can really book and he wasn’t trying to be subtle. I lost him after two blocks. Since you didn’t see him on the sidewalk, I’m guessing he had a vehicle or got on a bus.”
I hadn’t even noticed Pete in the elevator.
John?”
He was addressing a small, withered man in his sixties. I later learned from Sadie that this was John Lawless, the firm’s founder.
“Up to our client, I’d say.” His accent was from somewhere in New England. Bighouse smiled.
“A little competition,” he said. “I have confidence you will manage.” “Who’s on his side?” Lawless asked.
“No one.”
“Well, here’s the thing,” Lawless said. “You told us he wouldn’t be a problem at all. Now you tell us he has no help. How sure are you this time?”
“He has no money, he has no social skills and he has nothing to offer anyone. He knows it’s a bad idea to be here and now he knows that your firm is on the case. My guess is that he was following Mr. Night either to warn him off or to learn who he was working for. He saw Mr. Night in my company on the floor where an investigative firm is located. Lawrence wishes to acquire the qualities of leadership and persuasiveness from possession of the book. Lacking those qualities is why he pursues it alone.”
“We won’t go into what you get from having this book. My problem is that the only operative who can identify the target is now under a possible threat. How much of a threat, I’d like to know. You seem to think the stakes are high, and you imply but do not say that you are prepared to use violence against Willie Lawrence.”
“Mr. Lawless, I assure you…”
“Don’t assure me. Forty years I’m in this game, so I’m the one that knows it. Lawrence has shown himself to be a purse-snatcher, which is somewhat violent but not real violent. What are his other tendencies? I want a wrapper on him and I want to know what isn’t on his arrest
