Emperor of Ocean Park

CHAPTER 51

As so often, I am the first to speak, and what I say is utterly stupid: “You’re dead.”

Colin Scott seems to give this problem serious consideration, stroking his bushy new beard. A car passes by outside the gate, but it might as well be on the other side of the world. The hand holding the gun remains very steady, aiming at a spot midway between Dana and myself.

“He doesn’t look very dead to me, Misha,” whispers Dana, pretending that she is not frightened out of her wits. But I find myself growing calmer by the second. Either we will die here or we will not die here. The Judge always emphasized free will; I hunt around for the opportunity to exercise some.

“Keep your hands very still,” says Colin Scott at last. My hands, like Dana’s, are well up toward the stratosphere. All four are trembling. “Use your foot to push the box over to me.”

I do it. He makes no move to pick it up.

“I knew you must have a helper, Professor.” He turns to Dana. “We have not been introduced.”

I realize he is serious. I say awkwardly, “Dana, this is, uh, Agent-that is, Colin Scott, also known as Jonathan Villard. Mr. Scott, this is Professor Dana Worth.”

He nods, no longer interested, then cocks his head, listening. He frowns. He has the gun, so we wait for him to speak.

“Is somebody else here with you? Please don’t waste my time lying.”

“No, it’s just the two of us,” I assure him. Dana and I glance at each other, passing telepathic messages, trying to coordinate a lie. If telepathy only existed, we might even get away with it.

“Do you know what is in the box?”

“I opened it. It isn’t locked. I saw a package inside, that’s all.”

“That’s all.” He crouches, the gun holding us in place, and slowly lifts the lid. In the movies, this would be the moment when I would spin around and kick the gun out of his hand while the bad guy stood still and let me do it, watching in amazement.

I can no longer restrain myself: “They said you drowned.”

“It wasn’t me,” he answers calmly. “A man drowned, but it wasn’t me. I told you I would have to do something about the Bureau. Being dead is an excellent way to forestall an investigation.”

“I saw the photograph-”

“Yes, from the license. Well, that was me. The photograph. But a body from the water? Even a few hours with the fish can change the countenance to the point where it is difficult to tell.”

I feel a leaden chill. A few hours with the fish can change the countenance. Is that where Dana and I are headed?

Dana’s turn: “But the body was identified-”

“No. No, it was not. This is a common misperception.” He tilts his head the other way and purses his thick lips as though measuring us for a casket. “No body is ever really identified. Certainly no body that has suffered any decomposition. The fingerprints are identified. The dental work is identified. We assume that, if we know the owner of the fingerprints, we know the identity of the body. But that assumption is only as good as the quality of the underlying records.”

Even though I am likely to be dead in about ninety seconds, the semiotician in me is impressed. All of forensic science is, in this sense, based on a classic misapprehension of cognition: the inability to distinguish between the signifier and the signified. Fingerprints are the signifiers. Dental records are the signifiers. They are the coded messages to which we assign significance. The identity of the body, the person we decide is dead, is the signified. We all act as though knowledge of the first necessarily implies knowledge of the second. But the implication is only a convention. It is not celestial mechanics. It is not the healing of an illness. It works because we decide that it works. We make that decision by accepting, without question, the accuracy of the records themselves.

“You fiddled with the records,” Dana murmurs, for she never has any trouble keeping up. “Or somebody did.”

Colin Scott says nothing. This is not the time for true confessions. His silence is itself a menace… and an opportunity. His look is pensive. Not all, evidently, has gone as he planned. He is trying to decide what to do.

“So, you have the box,” I point out, fighting for time. “You’re safe now.”

“The box was never for me, Professor. That much of what I told you was true. I was… engaged… to recover it for someone else.”

“Who?”

Another long silence, weighing what to tell. His face is drawn, reminding me that he was already middle-aged when kicked out of the Agency almost thirty years ago. At last he says: “I am not here to offer you explanations, Professor. But do not assume that I was the only one hoping you would find this box. I am simply the only one who was present when you found it.”

Dana’s turn: “But why couldn’t you find the box on your own?”

Colin Scott’s yellow eyes turn toward her, flash dismissively, and return to me. Yet, in speaking to me, he is answering her question. “Your father was a brilliant man. He wanted you to find the box, but he also knew there would be somebody in the way. Me or somebody like me. He couldn’t take any chances.”

“What?”

“We knew what the Excelsior was, that was child’s play. And we knew we had the wrong boyfriend for Angela, or he would have told us what we needed to find out. But the cemetery… that was clever, Professor. Very clever.”

A silence. I break it. “Okay, so what do we do now?”

His thin, scarred lips curl into a slight smile, but he does not bother to answer. Instead, he gestures with the gun, moving us further away from the gate and along the path into the cemetery. Where he can kill us more easily. He points toward Dana’s belt. With trembling fingers, she detaches her cell phone and hands it to him. He glances at it briefly, then drops it onto the gravel and, without seeming to aim, fires two quick bullets into it. Dana flinches at the muted sound. So do I.

“You don’t have to be afraid, Professor,” he declares. His eyes appear to be watching us, the path behind us, and, impossibly, the paths off to either side, without any movement of his head. “I have what I came for, and you will never see me again. So I am not going to kill you.”

“You’re not?” I ask with my usual incisiveness.

“I have no compunction against killing. Killing is a tool one must be prepared to use in my profession.” He lets this sink in. “But there are such things as orders, and, as I once had occasion to tell your father, there are rules for this kind of thing.”

“Rules? What rules?”

Colin Scott shrugs, without moving the gun a millimeter. “Let us simply say that your friend Jack Ziegler, scum of the earth though he may be, is a very vindictive man.”

Yet he does not lower the gun, and I begin to see his problem. He is concerned about the promise Jack Ziegler made-the one of which he spoke in the cemetery on the day we buried my father, the one of which Maxine reminded me on the Vineyard, the one Uncle Jack told me in Aspen he intended to keep. The promise to protect my family. And this little drama is the result: Uncle Jack gave his orders, and even this professional killer, who has every reason to hate Jack Ziegler and to fear what I can tell the police, dares not disobey.

“He can’t hurt us,” says Dana, the relief evident in her voice. Her hands come down.

Colin Scott’s baleful eyes move, and the gun, too, swivels, ever so slightly.

“My orders are not to harm Professor Garland or any of his family. But I am afraid, Professor Worth, that nobody said anything about his friends.”

Dana sounds suddenly very small. “You’re going to kill me?”

“It is necessary,” he sighs, and now the gun is pointed at the bridge of her nose. “And it has a certain… symmetry.”

“Wait,” say both Dana and myself at the same time, our brains working full-bore to come up with the right words to slow him down.

“Please stand clear of Professor Garland,” he says reasonably, as though keeping me from accidental harm would be her number-one concern at the moment. A graveyard rat materializes from the shadows, white and gross and huge, and sits on its hind legs, maybe sensing that dinner will soon be available. “Just close your eyes, Professor Worth, and you will not even have time to feel any pain. You, Professor Garland, will move aside and turn your face to the wall of the mausoleum.”

“Don’t do this,” I protest.

“Professor Garland, I must ask you to turn away. You have heard enough to send me to death row. But you will not act on it, no matter what I do tonight, because, if you do, the orders regarding protection for you and your family are no longer binding. You might risk your own life, but you have a wife and a son to think of. Do you understand me?”

I thought I knew terror, but now it is alive within me, flapping about on mad, conscience-stealing wings. “Yes, but, you can’t just.. .”

“Turn around, Professor.”

“You’re going to kill me,” Dana repeats, her voice trembling.

In that instant, I commit the boldest and stupidest act of my four decades on this planet. I lower my hands and step between Dana Worth and Colin Scott.

“No, he isn’t,” I say, my voice shaking worse than Dana’s.

“Step out of the way, please, Professor,” says the man who killed the man who killed Abby.

“No.”

Mr. Scott hesitates. I can almost hear the wheels going round: He does not want Dana to escape and does not really want me to escape either, and maybe the best thing is to kill us both and trust in his ability to escape Jack Ziegler’s wrath. Or he may think he can blame my murder on somebody else. Or he may bet that Uncle Jack is so sick that his word does not carry the force it once did. Or his new client, whoever it is, might be even more powerful than the dreaded Jack Ziegler. Or he may have another theory, one I could neither imagine nor comprehend, for I do not live in his world. But, whatever the reason, I know an instant later that the former intelligence officer has made up his mind. He is going to kill us both, right here in the Old Town Burial Ground. His unbothered gaze carries the message as firmly as if it were chiseled in granite.

The gun barrel flicks up an inch or two and seems to grow very wide and dark, ready to swallow me up, and, even as I prepare to fling myself forward, I know I will never reach him in time to stop him from shooting, so I use my last seconds to pray instead and I wish I had a chance to say goodbye to my son and even my wife who is no longer fully my wife and I notice that Dana’s small hand is in mine and I hear the Twenty-third Psalm on her lips and I wonder where her fabled martial arts training has gone and my senses are brightly alive, I can see, almost, the individual hairs on Colin Scott’s red-dyed head, I can feel the pressure of his finger closing on the trigger, and then that deep and abiding instinct to live overwhelms my natural fatalism. I jerk free of Dana’s hand and leap across the small distance toward Colin Scott.

Then everything happens at once.

Colin Scott is very fast. In the fraction of an instant between the time I leave the ground and the time I come down on top of him, he squeezes the trigger, not once but twice, and the entire cemetery rocks with the sound of the gun’s report as my body goes suddenly icy, then numb, and I spin to one side, stumbling against an alabaster angel standing guard atop a headstone. I am amazed at the reverberations-his gun has a silencer, it should not be so loud-but I also realize that he was right, that I feel nothing at all, and then I realize that Dana is yelling something I am unable to hear, and also that I am not dead, the bullets must have missed, and Colin Scott is down on his knees and there is an awful lot of blood on the upper half of his shirt and the frozen gravel seems slick and my first thought is that somehow his gun has misfired, that it has exploded in his hand, and I am still on my feet, although woozy, and I push Dana back into the darkness toward the drainage pipe. She is clutching her shovel again, and it occurs to me that she must have hit Colin Scott with it, because there is a bloody gash on his forehead. Still trying to make Dana move, I keep my eye on Mr. Scott, who is swiveling around, one hand pressed to the ground, trying to point the gun behind him at something out in the darkness, and he fires twice more, very fast, two quick spits lighting up the cemetery and then vanishing in the flooding black, and then there is a loud cry from the shadows and Dana and I decide to hunker down and an instant later comes the sharp explosion of another gunshot and Colin Scott is flat on the ground now, the gun inches from his twitching hand, and his neck is very bloody and he is trying to say something, words are forming on his lips even as the light of life dies in his tear-filled, unseeing eyes, and I dare not go any closer because I do not know who is out there in the darkness waiting, but I see the shape of the simple sounds he is making and I know that his last living thought is of his mother.

Dana and I are flat on the ground.

Waiting.

Listening.

Footsteps crunching on the gravel. Moving slowly. Cautiously. Wary of a trap.

Dana is weeping. I don’t know why. We are the survivors. I am holding her close to me on the grass along the side of the path. I feel chilly despite my parka. Dana is shivering and light as a feather in my arms. Mr. Scott is a bloody mess.

We are too frightened to move.

A flashlight flicks over us, picks out what is left of Colin Scott, slices the air above our heads as dancing specks cloud my vision.

We lie still. I sense that there is something I should be doing, but a lethargy has stolen over me. My body no longer wants to move. Perhaps it is the aftereffect of mortal terror.

The light is very close, almost blinding. I see what might be sneakers. Jeans. But whoever shot Colin Scott does not say a word, and Dana and I cannot see a thing. We hear a metallic scrape, then the light clicks off.

The footsteps begin to recede, and Dana vaults to her feet with an angry cry. Grabs Colin Scott’s gun from the ground. Runs. Not toward the exit. Into the darkness.

“Dana!” I cry, scrambling after her, stepping around what is left of Mr. Scott. My voice is faint, tinny, an echo of an echo. “Dana, wait!” But my cry is a whimper. “Dana!”

I start to sway. The darkness swirls from black-black to black-gray to gray-gray, and the ground spins up to meet me once more. Dana disappears. I start to pick myself up again. I want to tell her that she is being foolish, that we should take the box and head for the gate or the drainpipe, but I lack the strength to call out. I slump against the headstone. I see the alabaster angel towering above me. Dana is gone. But it all seems very unimportant. My hands grow numb. Leaning against the stone is like clutching water. No, ice. I slide to the ground. One of my feet is twitching horribly. My stomach itches but I cannot lift a finger to scratch. In the glow of my fallen flashlight, I see why Dana ran. The metal box is gone; whoever shot Colin Scott must have taken it while we were blinded by the flashlight. That was the metallic scrape I heard.

I try to pray. Our Father who… who art… who art in…

I gather my energy, trying again to rise, to think, to focus.

God, please… please…

But sustaining these thoughts requires too much energy. I need to rest. The grass is sticky red underneath my cheek. Just before the shadows close in, I realize that not all the blood belongs to Mr. Scott.

I was shot after all.