Crime Machine

26

THE SKY OVER BLACK LAKE WAS astonishingly blue, almost indigo at the highest point of the dome, paler at its fringes. The man called Papa stood in Lloyd’s living room, staring out the window, hands clasped behind his back—a pose that seemed habitual with him. His cohorts—his so-called family—were outside somewhere, and Papa had magnanimously allowed Lloyd to emerge from his bedroom, although he was still tethered at the ankle like a goat.

“Astounding,” Papa said, “the things that can fall out of a clear blue sky.”

“You’re referring to unexpected events?” Lloyd said. He felt it prudent to engage in conversation with this psychopath, on the theory that it’s harder to kill a man you’ve gotten to know. No one who had gotten to know Henry, for example, could have imagined ending such a benign life.

Papa spoke in a tone of recitation, without turning around. “Book of Joshua. The Israelites rout the Amorite army and are chasing them all over the map when a rain of stones falls from a clear blue sky and decimates the enemy.”

“Oh. Bible stories.”

“Cambridge, Maryland, 1828. Twelve days of rain force a man named Muse to stop digging a ditch around his property. When he ventures back outside, he finds the ditch teeming with fish—six, seven inches long, some of them. Perch. Bass. No river within miles of the place. No explanation how they got there.”

“A delivery truck,” Lloyd said. “A Natural Resources truck on the way to stock a lake maybe. Gets stuck in the storm and has to jettison cargo.”

“Wake up, Lloyd—this is the nineteenth century. Early nineteenth century. November 13, 1833. Rahway, New Jersey. A rain of fire. Locals describe blobs of burning jelly falling from the sky. Moment they burn out, they turn to white powder.”

“There were munitions factories in New Jersey,” Lloyd said. He was a U.S. history buff and happened to know. “They come into prominence later, during the Civil War.”

“No, Lloyd.” Papa turned and spoke as if to a recalcitrant student. “As it happens, there was a meteor shower that same day. It’s inconceivable to me, and I hope to you, that the two events are unrelated.”

Lloyd was not sure how to respond. Ready agreement might be taken as an insult. Disagreement, however gently expressed, risked violence. He made a noncommittal sound.

Papa turned from the window and came closer.

“What I’m pointing out, Lloyd, is that I happen to be a similar sort of phenomenon.”

He took a stub of pencil from his left-hand pocket and a small sharpener from his right. He sharpened the pencil and put the sharpener back in his pocket and took out a small black notebook. He undid the elastic and opened it and made a note and put the pencil and the notebook back into his pocket. He sat on the end of the sofa closest to Lloyd and leaned on the armrest. “You don’t remember me, do you.”

“Remember you?”

Papa leaned closer, dark blue eyes assessing him. “I’ve been waiting for you to put two and two together, Lloyd, but it looks like you never will. Not without a nudge.”

“I’m sorry,” Lloyd said. “You have the advantage. I don’t—We’ve met before? You and I? We met somewhere?”

“Indeed, yes.”

“I’m sorry. You look vaguely familiar …”

“Here’s a little clue for you, Lloyd.” Papa reached across the gap between the sofa and the armchair and pressed Lloyd’s shoulder as if he were ringing a doorbell. “Seattle.”

“Seattle. That’s supposed to jog my memory?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“I’ve been to a lot of fur auctions in Seattle. How am I supposed to remember one time?”

“Well, you’re right—it was a fur auction. Twelve years ago.”

“Twelve years ago. Was it at one of those big dinners?”

“Getting warm. After dinner. Hotel bar. You were with some honcho from Lord & Taylor.”

Lloyd snapped his fingers. “Ron Weissman. He was retiring that year. We met in the hotel bar. You came up and asked me something. I remember. You were with a beautiful young woman.”

Papa smiled. “Thataboy, Lloyd. That’d be Christine. Broke my heart.”

“You came up and asked me a question.”

“I asked you a question. Very good. Do you remember the question?”

Lloyd shook his head. “No. No, I can’t say that I do.”

Papa smiled—a flash of a grin totally unconnected to the neutral expression of the rest of his face, quickly gone. “Of course not. Why would you? I asked if you could spare a minute. You were very polite at first. You said sure. And so I started to fill you in on an idea I’d been working on for months. Years, actually. A concept that involved organizing trappers and buyers—and manufacturers like yourself—into a top-down outfit.”

“And I said I wasn’t interested.”

“You didn’t put it so eloquently at the time. How many words was that? Five? Six? You didn’t come near to wasting that many words. What you said was, ‘Not interested.’” Papa held up two fingers before Lloyd’s face. “Two words. As if I was some religious wacko forcing a flyer on you. ‘Not interested.’”

“And that offended you.”

Papa looked up at the ceiling and shook his head. When he looked back at Lloyd, he said, “When you step on a spider—an ant, a cockroach—don’t you think that offends him? When you spit in the face of someone who wants nothing more than to work co-operatively with you, do you not think that might offend him?”

For his entire adult life, Lloyd Kreeger had prided himself on being a down-to-earth, to-the-point sort of man. Honest, reliable, decisive. He valued courtesy, and even coming from a thief and possibly a murderer and certainly some kind of psycho, the accusation that he had been highhanded upset him.

“Perhaps you are not very experienced in business matters,” Lloyd said. “The greatest courtesy you can extend a businessman is to respect his time. Whatever the merits of your scheme might be—and to tell you the truth, I didn’t consider it long enough to even weigh them—I knew it wasn’t for me. I’d worked with trappers, I’d owned farms, but by that time I was strictly manufacturing and retail.”

“Naturally. Lloyd Kreeger is far too good to get his hands dirty.”

“Got nothing to do with being too good. I gave you the quickest answer possible. ‘Not interested.’ I apologize if that offended you, but it was the truth. Are you offended by the truth?”

“I live by it.”

“Then there’s nothing to be offended about.”

“It wasn’t what you said, Lloyd. It was how you said it. ‘Not interested, cockroach.’”

“I never said that.”

“The insect was implied in your tone. You were in a hurry to get away. A rush to get away from the pesky little bug. Swat him down.”

“Not true.” Lloyd shook his head. “Not true.”

“Did you know the Bastovs are dead?”

“Lev Bastov?”

“It was on the news last night. Both Lev and Irena Bastov were killed last week, right here in Algonquin Bay. Couldn’t identify them till now. Had their heads cut off. What do you think—Russian mob?”

“The Bastovs were murdered?”

Papa nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Lloyd felt something cold turning in his stomach. “You did it, didn’t you?.”

Papa smiled. “I could never do something like that. It’s not in me. Besides, I hardly knew them. But to get back to our conversation about Seattle, you can say whatever you want, Lloyd. You can tap dance around the issue. Obfuscate and rationalize. Tell us the moon is blue, tell us it never snows in Algonquin Bay, Ontario. It’s fine. I am indifferent. Just like you were indifferent. You have to love indifference, don’t you think? If I had to make a choice, I’d have to say indifference was the perfect state of mind. The natural state of mind. But everything you say just begs the question, Lloyd.”

“What question?”

“Who’s the insect now?”

In the days since Lemur’s death, Papa had begun teaching Nikki how to shoot a rifle. He didn’t say as much, but she knew it was to help get her mind off Lemur. And he enlisted Jack as an instructor, which she wouldn’t have thought possible after their altercation. First thing he did was to give Jack an absolute apology. Found Jack sulking in the living room that afternoon and called Nikki in because he wanted it to be public, so to speak. I was in the wrong, Jack—I was upset about Lemur and I just lost it. You were wrong too, but I should never have used violence against a family member. It violates my own principles, and I hope you’ll find it possible to forgive me.

When Jack didn’t say anything, Papa went and got the shotgun and handed it to Jack and knelt with his back to him. Told him to go ahead and bash his skull, he had every right. But Jack wouldn’t do it, and after a while he seemed to relax a little. Eventually Papa cajoled him into coming outside with them, saying all sorts of good things about him. I’ll let Jack show you the longer-range techniques—he’s a much better sniper than I am. Or, Watch how Jack does it. He’s just got an instinct for this, and it never fails.

They had good weather, a little warmer than it had been, so Nikki’s fingers didn’t freeze handling the rifles. Then, just when she was getting used to target practice outdoors, Papa took her and Jack down to the basement, bringing along a couple of handguns. Still in his scoutmaster mode, still deferential to Jack.

“Decisive battles never arise in ideal circumstances. Right, Jack?” he said. “We don’t get to choose when or where we have to deal with matters of life and death. The fact is, if you’re ever called upon to use your sidearm, it’s likely going to be indoors. So you have to get used to shooting inside. What do you think, Jack?”

“Absolutely true,” Jack said. “You hit the nail there.” If he still harboured any anger against Papa, he was keeping it locked up. Papa got him to show Nikki the proper stance, the crouch, the drop and turn—all of this without firing a shot—while he stood looking on, offering advice and encouragement. They had her practise the moves over and over again.

At one point he said, “You know what’s stupid about most people owning firearms, Nikki?”

“They end up shooting themselves by accident? Or someone steals them?”

“True enough. But what’s the all-out stupidest thing? Jack, I think you know.”

“The all-out stupidest thing,” Jack said, in a tone Nikki recognized as the sound of rote memory, “is when an assailant just walks right up and takes the gun out of his victim’s hands. Because most people, when it comes down to the wire, are just not ready to shoot anyone.”

“He’s right, Nikki. See, they train boxers by having them hit the bag. Hit it fast, hit it hard, hit it again and again and again. Partly that’s to develop speed and power. But more important, it’s to overcome our natural reluctance to hit another human being. In matters of life or death or honour, when you’re called upon to protect the family, you’ve got to be able to overcome that kind of reluctance. Frankly, I blame myself I didn’t train Lemur well enough—that it came to crunch time and he hesitated that fraction of a second too long. So now I’m going to get you set up so you don’t even feel any reluctance to shoot. You’ll be like Jack—a warrior down to your bones.”

What they were saying made sense, Nikki supposed. She had been wondering why Lemur hadn’t used his gun. Poor guy. She pulled his iPod touch from her pocket. “Um, I took this out of Lemur’s room. Do you think he’d mind?”

Papa looked at Jack then back to Nikki. “I think he’d probably want you to have it.” He went behind the wet bar and pulled down a brandy glass. He set it on the mantel and came back to stand behind Nikki. “Weaver stance.”

“You want me to shoot that glass?”

“That’s exactly what you’re going to do.”

“Maybe I should shoot a tin can instead.”

“You hear that, Jack?”

“Reluctance,” Jack said. “Pure reluctance is what I hear.”

“Exactly. It’s what a criminal, or a terrorist, or a rogue government agent depends on—your reluctance. That is the last time you’re going to express it, Nikki.”

Nikki adopted the slight crouch, left palm cradling right hand. The handgun packed a bigger thrill than the rifle. It felt so solid, so perfectly contoured for the hand. Even its disproportionate heaviness, once the clip was in, was pleasing.

Nikki fired and the glass exploded. Jack let out a whoop.

“Good,” Papa said. “But you hesitated.”

Over the next half-hour he set up more glasses, an ornamental vase, a cute old teddy bear, several hats, various shirts and jackets belonging to Lloyd, framed photographs, even a couple of statues. They had to weigh a lot, the way Papa and Jack struggled with them. It was the teddy bear that gave her the most trouble.

“Shoot him,” Papa said. “Save your life. Save your family. Shoot him.”

Nikki shot the bear and he twirled into the air and landed face down. The stuffing blown out of his back pierced her heart.

The statues were easier. One of them was a Greek god or something. Some dead Roman. Nikki had seen a similar statue in a museum once. Boring thing with a tiny little dick. She shot at the blank eyes and blew away a chunk of forehead and curls. She fired again and half the nose burst into dust. Suddenly the mouth looked delicate, almost feminine—tiny bow up top, plump droop of the bottom lip. A few more shots and there was no face left, not even much of a head.

Papa said wonderful things to her the whole time: That’s our girl. You’re Nikki the Kid. You’re making me proud. She never knew words could have such power. She had seen TV images, some frozen wasteland where slabs of ice were breaking off and sliding into the sea. That was the sensation inside her now. Blowing plaster gods to smithereens, a hot automatic in her fist, and she starts to sniffle. Or maybe she was still remembering Lemur.

“Don’t even think about it,” Papa said. “No reluctance. No hesitation. And most of all, no tears.”

He unplugged the television. It was a flat panel like the one upstairs, forty inches at least, and he picked it up like it was made of Styrofoam.

“Aw, not the TV,” Jack said.

“She has to learn.” Papa set it down in front of the fireplace and plugged it in again. He clicked through channels until he found the kind of image he wanted—a man and woman reading the news. No sound.

“Shoot the man,” he said.

“You want me to shoot the TV?”

“Nikki, this kind of hesitation will kill you. Shoot the man now.”

Nikki took aim and put a hole through the man’s left eye. His mouth kept moving, head bobbing behind a pool of blackness that fanned out from the hole like black blood.

Jack let out another whoop. “Watch out, people. Nikki the Kid’s in town!”

“Shoot the woman,” Papa said, and Nikki did.