Ghost of a Flea

Chapter Twenty

“It always escalates, Lew. You know that.”

“She didn’t want to bother me with it. Wanted to wait till I was out of the hospital at least, she said. I’m not sure she would have brought it up at all, if Larson hadn’t pushed.”

“So he’s concerned.”

“Larson’s the one who told me about it in the first place. Couldn’t have been easy for him, either. He and Alouette have a strong relationship, if not one we’d think of as ordinary. They have their own, quite independent lives. Distinct personalities. But they’re solidly together and respect one another’s opinions, beliefs, decisions. Seems to be plenty of space left in the relationship for that.”

“You’re saying he saw coming to you with this as a violation.”

I nodded.

Don stood, flexing back and shoulder muscles. He rolled his head forward and back, shoulder to shoulder. “Used to be I could sit for more than five minutes without everything stiffening up, you know?”

I knew.

“I don’t keep moving, body’s not the only thing’s gonna stiffen up,” Don went on. “So in past weeks there’ve been more of these messages.”

“More of them, and closer together.”

He glanced again at the one in his hand.

“Look, it’s not like there’s anything else I have to do, Lew. I can sit at home and spend my mornings worrying what’s for lunch, or I can get up off my butt and onto this. Still have favors I can call in. Forensics, for a start. I’ll have them take a look at this.” He held up the note. “And the file from her computer at work. You got any problem with my talking to Alouette, asking her about it?”

“Not if she doesn’t.”

We were silent then. I’ve been blessed with good friends.

“Where are you?” Don said finally.

“I was remembering the first time I saw you, slumped against a wall downtown with blood pooling under you and garlic on your breath.” The day he’d saved my life. “Then, later, how you showed up at my place with this yellow piece-of-shit BanLon shirt on. I mean, just how fucking white can you get?”

Don shrugged.

We’d been friends so long, been through so much together, that looking at him was a lot like looking in the mirror. And just as somewhere in your mind you stay twenty years old forever and are always slightly surprised when this old guy’s head pops up in there, I was never quite prepared to see my friend looking so tired and worn down.

“You miss him, Don?”

Something we’d rarely spoken of since it happened. We found him, half afloat, half submerged, in the bathtub, plastic bag secured about his head.

“Every day of my life. I just keep thinking, if only I’d had the chance to get to know him better. If I’d made the chance, found it somehow.”

“You did what you could.”

“I don’t know…. I know what he was, Lew. Like I told you then, it just doesn’t seem to make much difference.”

“He was right about one thing: Everything’s water if you look long enough.”

Don nodded. “From his note.”

“Maybe it doesn’t matter how much time you have. Maybe you’re still left with all these piles of unfinished business.”

Don sank back into his chair. “When did everything turn to past tense for us, Lew? You notice that happening?”

I shook my head.

He picked up the paper again. “You know what this is from?”

If I have now made up my mind to write it is only in order to reveal myself to my shadow, that shadow which at this moment is stretched across the wall in the attitude of one devouring with insatiable appetite each word I write. It is for his sake that I wish to make the attempt. Who knows? We may perhaps come to know each other better.

“A Persian novel, The Blind Owl.”

“Which of course you’d read.”

“Not a clue. But it took Rick about two minutes flat to track it down on the Internet.”

“And what is this? Drawn on?”

“Looks like someone did it on a computer, ran the typeface up to the point of blurring when he printed it out on an old dot matrix printer-not a well-maintained one, at that-then photocopied the printout. That’s Rick’s guess, anyhow.”

“Why go to all that trouble?”

I shrugged. “Why send it in the first place? Maybe he thought he was covering his tracks somehow, maybe he sent copies to world leaders, stuck them under windshield wipers at the nearest mall. Who the hell knows? We think he may have been trying to make it look like an engraving.”

“Okay. There’s anything here useful, the lab’ll find it.” He held the paper up close. “That flytrack at the bottom some kind of signature?”

“I’m pretty sure it says William Blake.”

“Tiger, tiger guy?”

I nodded. “Poetry was kind of a sideline for him, though. By trade he was an engraver. In his spare time he talked to angels.”