Dead Line

Chapter Twenty-six

What I really needed was sleep. What I really wanted was a beer. So when I got home to my waterfront condominium at the end of a day that began in Paris and seemed to last, I don’t know, roughly forever, I reached into the refrigerator, past Elizabeth’s old tubs of hummus and half-eaten bags of baby carrots, and pulled out the coldest Sam Adams I could find, which was actually the only one left. Hey, look at me everyone; I’m on a lucky roll.

I looked down at Baker’s water bowl, still brimming, and his food bowl, filled with uneaten kibble, and shook my head in a sad, slow kind of way. Now was not the time to pack these things away, along with his bed and stuffed toys and the rawhide strips and filthy tennis balls that sat in every corner and beneath every chair in the house. Truth be known, I don’t know when that time would be.

I suddenly felt not only exhausted, but utterly aimless. I didn’t want to sit on the couch, because that’s where I’d always sit with Baker sprawled beside me. I wasn’t ready for bed yet, and anyway, bed was where I spent an inordinate amount of time in the company of Elizabeth, and she wasn’t of my world anymore either. So I threw on a fleece coat that was hanging in the closet and slid open the door to the deck.

The chill autumn air engulfed me and, at least for the moment, awakened me. It was just four days before that I sat out there with Elizabeth, topless, reading my story in awe, Baker scratching at the door to join us. Four days. Four days that can change a life, end a life, sink a career, ruin a relationship, alter the way you look at everything and everybody. But that reminded me, so I struggled to my feet, ambled inside, grabbed the portable phone and came back onto the deck, sliding the door shut behind me.

I suppose I could have just called Elizabeth’s cell phone and been assured of talking to her, but instead I called her new apartment atop Russian Hill in San Francisco. It was midnight, my time, 9:00 P.M. on the quirky coast, and I pictured her sitting in her living room sipping tea watching a rented movie on television, maybe a little bit sad about us, nervous about a future that didn’t involve me in a city that was far from anyplace she had ever called home. I was sad, and I wanted to hear her voice. Maybe she wanted to hear mine. Stranger things have happened.

It rang and rang and rang, straight through to her voicemail. Here in Boston, it was her voice on our message telling callers to leave word for either one or both of us. I always liked that part—“both of us.” Now, it was her voice giving just her first name, saying leave a message and she’d be sure to call back. I’m sure it was just my lack of sleep, but every little thing made me profoundly sad.

“Hey, it’s Jack. Listen, I wanted to tell you this in person, or rather, voice to voice. Things are spinning out of control here, on this story and on everything else. Most important, something terrible happened with Baker tonight. He was acting really sick, and I took him over to Angell, and Lisa Stoles did some X-rays.”

My voice caught, and I paused to gulp some salt air and collect myself. “They came back really bad.” Another pause, by necessity. “He had a big tumor in his stomach, and all sorts of little ones in his chest — very fast growing, the doctor said. The big one had ruptured and the poor guy could barely lift his head. He was in a lot of pain.”

Still another collecting pause as I looked out over the barren black expanse of the harbor on a starless, moonless night. The thought occurred that the machine might cut me off for a time, so I said, “I didn’t have a choice. I had to put him down. Baker died in peace with me right beside him. I’m so sorry to tell you like this.”

And I hung up.

I took a long pull on the Sam and wondered if things could turn good as quickly and thoroughly as they had turned bad. Probably not, but as Hemingway once wrote, “Isn’t it pretty to think so.”

My mind wandered, which was good, because anything was better than where it was then. There was a day a couple of years earlier when I was splashing around in this same harbor in the middle of April, chasing a hired gun who I had feared did some harm to Elizabeth. The great Hank Sweeney cannonballed into the water after me, then had to be fished out by the cops a couple of minutes later because he didn’t know how to swim. Thinking of the moment, I couldn’t help but allow my mouth to form into a half smile.

But what was wrong with him now? Aside from delivering the tapes of the mayor and Hilary Kane, he’d been virtually invisible on this story, and truth be known, I could really use his help. The drunk thing in Southie was the most uncharacteristic stunt I’d ever seen him pull. I’d call him on it in the morning.

Another long pull. I told myself to savor it, because it was the last one. What the hell, maybe I’d go from the beer into the mouthwash.

My eyes were growing heavy. Images of Hilary Kane drifted into my muddled thoughts, then Maggie, followed by the mayor and his son, wherever the hell he was, which may well be my bedroom, the way things were going. Nail this story, I told myself, and get out of the business before it swallowed you whole, dominated your entire life, so I wouldn’t wake up one of these days as the typical fifty-five-year-old, twice-divorced mid-level editor in a medium paying job with almost all of life’s virtues in the rearview mirror and nothing ahead but more of the painful same. Hang a shingle with Mongillo. Take control. Do some crisis management for companies in public relations peril. Call your own shots.

I thought of my father, of my wife, of a daughter that I never had. Yes, life might be for the living, but why are my thoughts so dominated by the dead?

Sometime thereafter, I heard it. I awoke with a start, my neck stiff from the chair and my skin cold from the ocean breeze. The sound wasn’t immediately clear to me. I only knew that it was loud and unusual. My first thought was that Baker was about to start barking and scratching until he got to the origin, not to commit any act of protective savagery, but to see if it was possible that he might get scratched on the head. Then, as I gained cognizance, I realized that the way of my world had changed.

So I sat for a moment to collect thoughts and acquire bearings. That’s when I heard it again — the sound of a hard, falling object, bouncing on the floor, maybe breaking, somewhere inside the apartment.

I lifted myself slowly out of the chair and crouched by the glass door, trying to see inside at whatever it was that was causing the commotion. But I saw nothing but black.

Behind me, the wind had picked up. All around me, the night had gone from pleasantly cool to surprisingly cold. My heart was beating so loud that I wondered if I could quiet it down.

I slowly, arduously opened the sliding door, trying not to make a sound. When it was open just wide enough for me to squeeze through, I did, and pulled it shut as slowly and as quietly as I had opened it.

Inside, I remained crouched by the door, listening as intently as I ever had to anything in my life, for the sound of breathing, footsteps, panic, danger — again, anything. I ran through my options, which I quickly assessed as follows: Turn on the lights, or not turn on the lights. With the former, I’d probably learn the identity of the intruder, but he’d be armed, I wasn’t, and thus the information would be short-lived, as would I. By not turning on the lights, I was taking away his obvious advantage of gunplay, and using my advantage of geography. I knew the apartment; he didn’t.

So I began walking slowly and precisely away from the door, feeling the air with my hands. In a distant corner of the living room, I could see the pale green power light for the CD player in an open antique cabinet that also held the television, which gave me an idea.

Hunched down by the floor, I slowly, breathlessly moved toward the area of the coffee table in the center of the living room. My knee found it before my hands did, but that’s all right. I’m young and virile and can take it — I think. I felt around in the dark on the surface of the table until I found the remote control, and held on to it fast as I inched back toward the area of the balcony door.

I heard nothing. Even as my eyes were adjusting to the dark, I saw nothing. Truth is, I didn’t even sense anything, but my perceptions, possibly dulled by the cold and sleep, may not have been firing in the sharp way that usually characterizes the pointed life of Jack Flynn.

But things don’t crash in the night without cause. Any physicist and detective will agree on that. No, there was something or somebody in here, an invasion that would fit in just perfectly with the way my life has spun out of control these prior several days.

Over by the door, I gripped the remote as if it were a gun. I wish. I put my face right up to it, peering at the tiny abbreviations that described each button. Who could have known that my life would be better off, and possibly longer, if I had spent more time watching TV, and thus memorizing the setup on my universal control.

I set my thumb over what I vaguely thought was the power button. It was the biggest one on there, round while the others were square. I pointed it toward the nineteen-inch RCA that I had bought about fifteen years ago when the Patriots made the Super Bowl and got slaughtered by the Chicago Bears. And I pressed it.

The television came to life, maybe not as fast as I had hoped, but fast enough for results. On the other side of the living room, I caught a flash of motion, and it wasn’t just the little dance routine that Britney Spears was doing on behalf of my least favorite soft drink, Pepsi.

Again, another crash as I watched a hulking silhouette jump over a side table and knock a couple of photographs to the floor — me and Elizabeth, Baker and Elizabeth, my father in his pressmen’s apron. I yelled, “Stop, asshole!” which was probably not the smartest thing to do. In the light of the TV, he could easily see me, and if he so desired, put a bullet right through me. The most I could do was change channels, which, while annoying, didn’t have the same effect.

He paused for the briefest of moments to get his bearings. His face was covered by a black ski mask. I must say, having a guy in a mask breaking into your house in the dark of the night is something I really didn’t need right now, but it was probably inevitable that I had. So for no good reason, and yet for every good reason, I lunged across the room at him.

The wind was hammering against the sliding door. The Coors Light twins were gallivanting across the television screen. My intruder was staring at me from beneath his mask as I leapt over the couch. He had turned to run toward my front door when I dove onto my hardwood floors and brought him down by his ankle. Maybe I should have played football rather than poker in my days back at Wesleyan University.

I braced for what I thought would be the searing pain of a bullet, or the cutting agony of a knife, or maybe the brutality of the butt of a gun slamming into my forehead. Instead, what I felt was a fist, which, while painful, was almost quaint, given the other options. He punched me in the face, catching my left cheek. I burrowed my head against the floor to protect myself and threw my body into his.

I made hard contact. I heard him groan as he fell from a crouch to a sprawl. I climbed on top of him and dug my knees into his stomach and began hammering him about his woolen face with my bare fists. When I reached down to pull his mask off, he somehow found the strength to push me off with his forearms, and as I regained my balance, he connected with a thunderous kick to one of my favorite parts, which, of course, was my groin.

I didn’t just see stars, I saw the sun, the Milky Way, the entire galaxy, make it the universe. I heard Frank Sinatra singing “Fly Me to the Moon,” and I don’t think it was coming from the TV. I fell to the bare floor in breathless agony, reflexively folding into a fetal position, anticipating a withering attack. Instead, in my pounding ears, I heard shuffling, then footsteps, then my front door open and close. And I realized through the heavy haze of pain that I was wonderfully, mercifully, exquisitely alone. After that, all I heard was a commercial on television, a baseball player prattling on about taking Viagra. Terrific. Right now, I’d need that and a crane set to perform.

Eventually, I struggled to my feet. You could have had Cheryl Tiegs and Farrah Fawcett, both in their prime, show up naked in my living room and engage in a sweaty catfight, and all I’d want was a bag of ice. I steadied myself against the wall, contemplating the great fortune of the intruder’s departure, and flicked on the switch for the hallway light. From there, I walked into the living room and turned on a table lamp.

That’s when I saw it, the reason for the visit, the cause of the rapid departure. This wasn’t a hired assassin or even a self-employed burglar. He was a courier, and his package was sitting on my couch. It was a painting, a two-masted boat tossed almost sideways by high waves in dark, churlish seas, with a haunting light on some of the passengers, and other passengers, including what seemed to be a Christ figure, gathered in apparent prayer.

Unless I’m an idiot, and hey, it’s a distinct option, I believed this was Storm on the Sea of Galilee, by Rembrandt, arguably the most famous painting stolen from the Gardner Museum on that Sunday night in 1990. And here it was, unfurled in all its glory, adhered to a piece of cardboard, sitting in my living room in the exact spot on my couch where my now dead dog and I usually hung out. Beside the painting was a small white envelope, unsealed, and I opened it up and pulled out a plain, white, heavy note card. On it were the words, “This time you really will be hearing from us.” It was an apparent play on the last words spoken to the bound guards by the Gardner thieves.

Mother of Christ, if I continued on a roll like this, old Steph-an from the museum would start calling me Jacques and be more than willing to give me a lot more than the time of day.

I sat down on the couch beside the Rembrandt, unsure what you’re supposed to do when there’s a priceless treasure in your living room. The next flight to Rio was one option, but life was getting in the way of every pleasant possibility. I peered across the room at the clock on the VCR, which told me it was 3:05 A.M. Deadline for Sunday’s paper had long since come and gone, not that I would have tried to make it. I had been asleep for more than two hours.

I walked to the front door and locked it. I flicked the security bar on the sliding doors as well. I thought about calling the police, but quickly decided it wasn’t a viable option. Peter Martin, bless his lonely soul, was probably sitting right by his phone waiting to hear from anyone with news, but I didn’t have the energy to get him involved in the middle of the night. It would mean a visit, a session with his security team, all the accompanying bullshit. All I wanted to do was go to bed, Rembrandt or not.

That’s when the phone rang. Apparently, these guys weren’t kidding. I really would be hearing from them. The sound echoed through my utterly empty house like cannon fire. I picked it up on the third ring, expecting to get a man’s voice that I didn’t necessarily know. Instead, what I heard was sobbing.

“Hello?” I said. Sobbing. Pause. Me again, asking, “Who is this?”

Still more sobbing. Impatiently, I said, “Yeah, who’s calling?”

The crying quieted, then gave way to the sniffily but forever familiar voice of Elizabeth Riggs. “He’s really dead?” It was as much a sad statement as it was a question.

My voice suddenly thickened, and I said, softly, “He really is.”

“Jack, I’m so sorry. I loved that dog more than anything in this world, and I know that somehow you loved him even more. I loved what he did to us. I know he’s a dog, but he made us more than a couple. He helped create this little family.”

Each of her words was driven into my gut in almost the same way that the Rembrandt courier did with his knee. Even more softly, I said, “I know.”

“And now we’re not together, Jack, and Baker’s not around.” She began crying again.

In almost a whisper, not knowing what else to say, I replied, “You’re right.”

“Jack, I’m so sorry, but I’ve got to go. I’ll call you soon, okay, and we’ll talk about it more.” She hung up the receiver and I clicked off the portable phone and let it fall aimlessly to the couch.

“Well,” I said to the painting, “it’s just me and you, Rembrandt. Do you have a first name, or were you like Madonna or Tiger and didn’t need one?”

I picked the painting up and limped into the bedroom with it tucked under my arm. I looked around the room for a place to hide it, and ended up sliding it under the bed. Good plan, huh? No one would ever think to look for it there. I stripped off my clothes and tumbled onto the comforter. I’d need to be up in a few hours to let the world know about the return of another treasure. I also needed to accuse the mayor of Boston of murder.

Stretched out on the hard mattress, I muttered to myself, “What a way to live a life.” Fortunately, before I could think too much about it, I was very much removed from the material world.