The Darkest Evening Of The Year

Chapter 43

Billy Pilgrim walked twice past the building that housed Brian McCarthy’s company offices and apartment. The windows were dark on both floors.

The boss had confirmed by phone that the deal was made. McCarthy and Redwing were evidently on the road to Santa Barbara by now.

Billy returned to the Cadillac in which Pauline Shumpeter had died of a massive stroke but had not soiled herself. He boldly reparked it in the lot beside McCarthy’s building.

After sheathing his hands in latex gloves, he got out of the car and climbed the exterior stairs to the apartment door.

He needed gloves because he didn’t intend to reduce this place to molten metal and soot with exotic Russian incendiary weapons. He would have preferred to leave fingerprints and then burn the building because his hands sweated in the gloves, and they made him feel like a proctologist.

With a LockAid lock-release gun, he picked the deadbolt pins in twenty seconds, went inside, closed the door behind him, and stood listening for the sound of somebody he might need to kill.

Billy did not usually kill two people per day and assist in the murder and disposal of two others. If this had been a take-your-son-to-work day, and if he had had a son, the boy would have come to the conclusion that his dad’s job was a lot more glamorous than it really was.

Sometimes months would pass between killings. And Billy could go a year, even two years, without having to waste a friend like Georgie Jobbs or a complete stranger like Shumpeter.

Sure, in his line of work, every day required the commission of felonies, but mostly they were not capital crimes that could earn you a lethal injection and burial at public expense.

Episodes of life seldom had the body count of good novels in the everything-is-pointless-and-silly genre, which is why Billy still read so many books even after all these years.

Unnervingly, episodes of real life also were not reliably as meaningless as life was portrayed by his favorite writers. Once in a while, something would happen to suggest meaningful patterns in events, or he would encounter someone whose life seemed to be filled with purpose.

On those occasions, Billy would retreat to his books until his doubts were put to rest.

If his favorite books failed to encourage a full renewal of his comfortable cynicism, he would kill the person whose life had seemed to be meaningful, which at once proved that the meaning had been an illusion.

The apartment remained silent, and finally Billy moved room to room, switching on lights.

He disliked the minimalist decor. Too Zen. Too calm. Nothing here was real. Life was chaos. This decor was not authentic.

Authentic decor was a deranged old lady living with fifty years of daily newspapers and thousands of bags of trash stacked throughout the residence, her husband dead twelve years on the parlor sofa, and twenty-six cats with various seizure disorders. Authentic decor was bombed-out shells of buildings, tenements full of crack whores, and anything Vegas.

Billy loved Vegas. His ideal vacation, which he didn’t get to enjoy often enough, was to go to Vegas with two hundred thousand in cash, lose half of it at the tables, win the losses back, then lose the entire bankroll, and kill a perfect stranger chosen at random on the way out of town.

In McCarthy’s annoyingly clean neon-free study, Billy unplugged the brain of the computer, carried it from the room, and stood beside the front door. When he headed for Santa Barbara, this logic unit would be in the trunk of his car. Later, he would flood it with corrosive materials and burn it in a crematorium.

The architect had been instructed to take his laptop with him. Billy would have to destroy that machine after McCarthy was dead.

In the study again, he searched the file cabinets and found the printouts of all the e-mails that Vanessa had sent to the architect over the past ten years. Although the waste can was tall, those files filled it to the brim, and he put them by the front door.

Because McCarthy might have saved old e-mail files on diskettes when he updated computers, Billy searched boxes of those but found nothing that, judging by the labels, needed to be trashed.

His purpose here was to eliminate anything that might, in the event of McCarthy’s disappearance, lead the police to Vanessa.

In the study and bedroom, he also searched for a diary. He did not expect to find one.

As with literature, authentic decor, ideal vacations, and so many things, Billy Pilgrim had a theory about diaries.

Women were more likely than men to think that their lives had sufficient meaning to require recording on a daily basis. It was not for the most part a God-is-leading-me-on-a-wondrous-journey kind of meaning, but more an I’ve-gotta-be-me-but-nobody-cares sentimentalism that passed for meaning, and they usually stopped keeping a diary by the time they hit thirty, because by then they didn’t want to ponder the meaning of life anymore because it scared the crap out of them.

He did not find a diary in McCarthy’s apartment, but he did find scores of art-paper tablets full of sketches and detailed drawings, mostly portraits. This suggested that the architect secretly yearned to be not a designer of buildings but instead a fine artist.

Pencil drawings littered the kitchen table. One of them was a striking portrait of a golden retriever. Some were studies of the dog’s eyes in different light conditions. Others were abstract patterns of light and shadow.

Billy became at once fascinated by the drawings because he inferred that during their creation, the artist had been in emotional chaos. Billy was a connoisseur of chaos.

He stood at the table, sorting through the pictures, and after a while he found himself in a chair without remembering having sat down. The wall clock revealed that he had been with the drawings for more than fifteen minutes, when he would have sworn it had been two or three.

Later, still enthralled by the art, he was startled to feel blood trickle down his face.

In no pain, puzzled, Billy raised one hand and felt his cheeks, his brow, seeking the wound, which he could not find. When he looked at his fingertips, they glistened with a clear fluid.

He recognized this substance. These were tears. In his line of work, he sometimes reduced people to tears.

Billy had not wept in thirty-one years, since he had read a huge novel of such stunning brilliance that it had drained him of his last measures of sadness and sympathy for his fellow human beings. People were nothing but machines of meat. You couldn’t feel sorry for either machines or meat.

That same novel had made him guffaw so strenuously, for so long, at the folly and bottomless stupidity of humankind that he had also used up his lifetime allotment of tears of laughter.

These new tears perplexed Billy.

They amazed and astonished him.

They also alarmed him.

Dread made his palms clammy.

The nanopowder-coated latex gloves were slimy with sweat, which backed up to the cuffs and leaked out at his wrists, dampening his shirt sleeves.

If his tears were tears of laughter, a preparatory lubricant for gales of giggles, he might have been able to accept them. But he did not feel any laughter building inside him.

His contempt for humanity remained so pure that he knew these could not be tears inspired by the richly comic horror of the human condition.

Only one other possibility occurred to him-that these were tears shed for himself, for the life that he had made for himself.

His alarm escalated into fear.

Self-pity implied that you felt wronged, that life had not been fair to you. You could only have an expectation of fairness if the universe operated according to some set of principles, some tao, and was at its heart benign.

Such an idea was an intellectual whirlpool, a black hole that would suck him in and destroy him if he allowed its fearsome gravity to capture him for another moment.

Billy knew well the power of ideas. “You are what you eat,” the nutritionists endlessly hector fast-food addicts, and you are also what ideas you have consumed.

With the thirst of an insatiable swillpot, he had poured down the fiction of two generations of deep thinkers, and he was pickled in their ideas, comfortably pickled. At fifty-one, he was too old to be transformed from a dill into a gherkin; he would have been too old at twenty-five.

He did not know why the drawings had brought him to tears.

Heart racing, breathing like a man in panic, he resisted the desire to study them further to ascertain the reason for their extraordinary effect on him.

With his happiness and his future at stake, Billy at once gathered up the drawings, hurried with them into Brian McCarthy’s study, and fed them through a paper shredder that stood beside the desk.

Half convinced that they wriggled with life in his hands, he packed the tangled mass of quarter-inch ribbons of paper into a dark-green plastic garbage bag that he found in the kitchen. Later, in Santa Barbara, he would burn the shredded drawings.

By the time he carried the computer brain, the wastebasket full of e-mail files, and the bag of shredded drawings to the Cadillac, where he stowed them in the trunk, his heart rate had subsided almost to normal, and he had regained control of his breathing.

Behind the wheel of the car, he stripped off the disgustingly slimy latex gloves and tossed them into the backseat.

He blotted his hands on his slacks, on his sport coat, on his shirt, and then drove away from McCarthy’s den of perils.

By the time he found the freeway entrance, the flow of tears had stopped, and his cheeks had begun to dry.

He suspected that to blot from his mind the entire disturbing incident, the best thing that he could do would be to kill a total stranger selected on a whim.

Sometimes, however, even a random act of murder had to wait for a more propitious moment. Billy was already late setting out for Santa Barbara, and he had to make up for lost time.