And Sometimes I Wonder About You

49

The policemen actually arrested me; took me to the station, snapped me face-forward and profile, took fingerprints, then interrogated me about various crimes that had happened with a black face maybe somewhere involved.

The whole show didn’t take long. When it was done they allowed me a phone call.

“Mr. McGill?” she said.

“Hey, Z. You back from the motherland?”

“Are you in Boston?”

“Cambridge jail.”

Sitting on a cot in a cell built for one, behind slatted iron bars, I felt unusually calm. I was the honey badger and Marella was the honey; Ericson, Jones, and Dame Gray were the common death threats along the way. And there I was, in the Cambridge jail, imprisoned for nothing I’d done wrong.

It could have been worse and there was still a chance that it might get that way.

These thoughts occurred to me in snatches because I was counting breaths and breathing ever so lightly.

At some point later a man in a black uniform came to pull me out of my meditation cell. He told me that I was being released.

“On bail?” I asked.

“No,” the barrel-shaped pink-skinned man said. “Just released.”

He led me to a room much like the one I’d been questioned in, but instead of inquisitors Melbourne Westmount Ericson and Twill were waiting for me. Along with them was a short chocolate-colored man in a ridiculous powder-blue suit that fit him like a medium glove on an extra-large hand.

“Harlan Sackman,” the new man said, holding out a hand. He had barely an inch on me.

I suppose he had a strong grip.

“I’ll be representing Mr. Ericson while he’s in Mass.,” the lawyer said. “The police have come to understand that their men were overzealous.”

“Overzealous? They arrested me for sitting on a street corner bench.”

“Actually,” Sackman said, “they arrested you for refusing a direct order.”

Sackman rankled me. I didn’t like his clothes or his profession, but what bothered me most was that he endorsed the behavior of the police. I never liked it when a person so identified with their oppressor that they forgave them.

“Come on, Pops,” Twill said, seeing my reaction. “Mr. Ericson and me did what you wanted.”

“Everything?” I asked my son while still staring at the powder-blue suit.

“Oh yeah.”

There was a stretch limo waiting outside the stationhouse. The four of us climbed inside and I gave the driver the name of our hotel.

We didn’t speak on the short ride.

When we got there I separated from the herd and asked the front desk if they had managed to get us the conference room. They had.

That’s when I got nervous.

There were all kinds of things that could have gone wrong. Maybe Ericson really wanted revenge and had his driver call ahead to whatever assassins he might have employed. Maybe Marella had run off as she’d said she might.

“To the room?” Twill asked me.

Ericson and the apologist Sackman were standing ten feet off discussing something.

“You got it?” I asked Twill.

“Of course.”

“Let me see.”

From inside his jacket he pulled out a packet of folded paper, about seven or eight sheets deep. I took the trove from him and pocketed it.

“Any trouble?”

“No,” Twill replied. “No airport machine, no body search. You were right when you said they’d never do a security scan on their own kind. When him and the head man sat down I asked if I could walk around the rooms. I went right to the shelf that Celia told us about. The history book was in the Swedish Bible. The letter was in a hole dug out in between the pages.”

Twill said no more because Melbourne and his lawyer approached us.

“Ninth floor,” I told them before they could ask.

Marella stood up from the conference table when we entered the room. She wore a tight white dress, its hem somewhere above the knee. Her dark skin against the formfitting fabric sent a chill through me.

She hadn’t been reading or writing when we arrived; just sitting there patiently like I had in my jail cell. It struck me that we’d not discussed literature. Maybe she was like most Americans, rarely if ever reading a book. That didn’t bother me at all. We weren’t all going to be readers. I could study Proust while she shopped for tight white dresses — the division of labor.

“Mar,” Melbourne Ericson said, all breathless.

“Sit down, Mel,” she said. “And who are you?”

“Harlan Sackman. I’m Mr. Ericson’s lawyer. I’m here to—”

“Wait outside,” she said as if maybe she was completing his sentence. “Mel and I need to talk one-on-one if we’re going to work anything out.”

I noted that her little black holster-purse was on the table. That might have bothered me if it wasn’t for the sexy white dress; that was the statement of intent for the billionaire.

“That’s okay, Harlan,” Melbourne said. “We’ll speak alone and then, if we need your help, we’ll bring you in.”

“Are you sure?” the lawyer asked his meal ticket.

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?” I asked Marella.

“You’re cute” was her answer.

Outside the conference room stood five stuffed chairs, placed there for less important players in the larger corporate games. Harlan and Twill were on their phones immediately reading texts, listening to messages, and making calls. I was anachronistic, taking out the handwritten letter penned by Charles Gray on both sides of each sheet. The lines in the lettering were so fine I decided that he must have been using a crow-quill nib.

The content was horrifying. There had been rapes and murders, mutilations and long-term starvations, tampering with genitals, eyes, and fingers; death served in a broad variety of ways and recounted in a dispassionate tone that made the content all the worse.

The only time that Charles showed any emotion in his writing was when he wrote about his mother (who he assumed would already be dead). He blamed her for the homicides, for creating a monster.

...it was my mother, who, by withholding her love made me into a thing that has no relation to right and wrong...

I read the letter through twice, making my plans. I was almost through the third pass when the conference room door opened and Melbourne and Marella came out. The last words of Charles’s confession were in my mind. I go now to my death having completed a life’s work in less than two decades.

“Congratulate me,” Melbourne Westmount Ericson said to Harlan Sackman.

While they were shaking hands and smiling, Marella came up to me.

“Say the word and we can leave right now,” she said, telling me many things.

I wanted to go. I wanted to leave everything behind me and, like my father, disappear into history.

“If you ever have a problem I’ll be there” was my reply.

Sackman approached us then with his felicitations for the bride-to-be... once more.

Melbourne reached out a hand to me and I grabbed it, pulling him close.

“If anything happens to her I will kill you,” I whispered. “Don’t make any mistake about that. So if it’s love I wish you well. Otherwise...”

“You don’t have to worry, Mr. McGill,” he said, managing a calm voice despite the pain in his hand. “I love her more than anything.”

What could I say? Marella wasn’t in jeopardy, Melbourne was.