Hidden River

11: THE LAST INCARNATION OF VISHNU

Ash on the fire escape. Images. A black cloud. My mother’s hand. Her cold fingers. What will you do, son?

I’ll join the cops, Ma.

No, no, don’t do that, it’ll upset your father, stay at university, it’s for the best.

Ok, I will, Ma. I will….

Them’s brave boys that are out in that, John mutters.

Aye, I say.

We sit and drink and the smoke comes slowly overhead like a continent. Ash from the big wildfire near Greeley. John walks to the rail and is almost lost in the vertical cliff of choking smog that hangs in a blanket above the buildings. A stink of fire. Water-carrying planes flying overhead. I’m waiting with him on the narrow fire escape steps. I’m standing and hugging myself and he is hunched over and spitting down onto the dead potted plants of the floors below.

We both smell of smoke. He passes me the bottle and I take it in my left hand. The American whiskey tastes sour. I gulp down a big swig of it and the fake heat evaporates the cold out of my ears. I give him the bottle back and he swallows down the rest. For a minute I think he’s going to throw it onto the ground and see if it smashes, but instead he sets it carefully on the iron slats of the fire escape.

We can maybe get ten cents back on that bottle, I say.

He turns to look at me and shakes his head, his shaggy hair still as his face moves. It’s a weird effect, not unconnected to the booze. I laugh a little.

I’m drunk and cold, I tell him.

If you’re cold, you can’t be drunk, ya big wean, alcohol numbs the senses, he announces in a tone of pissed authority.

Bollocks, I think. But I don’t want to argue with him. After all, he is dead.

Let’s go in, he says, this overhang is barely giving us any shelter. This smoke can’t be good for your lungs. Gimme a hand to get this thing open.

He gives me his cigarette and tugs on the window and tries to pull it up. It sticks on the first shove and he has to thump it. A heap of red ash falls on us from the wooden board covering the air conditioner on the next floor.

Hey, watch what you’re doing, John, I say.

Relax.

He bends his body and pushes past me, climbing in through the window, over the grille of the security gate.

Aye, like you couldn’t wait for me, I say sarcastically and look around at this sorry excuse for a town, the orange sky, the old buildings, shriveled and spectral. And all I can think about are the gray waves that separate us from our home. A moat between me and the braided dark.

Eagla, mathair, eagla, I whisper into the stinking air.

Are you saying something? he mutters from inside.

No.

Aye, well, get in and we’ll get this window closed, so we will. Quit your gabbing and get moving, he says suspiciously.

I put a leg over the metal trough. It’s sharp and comes up to my groin, so I can’t lean on it. I end up falling in and landing in a clatter on the floor.

Keep your comments to yourself, I say before he can call me an eejit.

You care about my comments, he says, with a sly grin on his pale face. Anyway, it’s late and it’s time we were in bed, he says.

I am in bed, I say.

And he looks at me, surprised.

So you are, he says. What are you doing?

I’m recovering from drowning and from Pat taking a shotgun pellet out of my leg and the fact that I’m going off ketch forever.

You’re not.

John, I have to. They’re having a fund-raiser, a ball. We saw it on Channel 9. And I’m going. And this time I won’t screw up. This time I’m going to kill him. I’m quitting ketch. Pat’s helping me.

John looks at me skeptically.

You couldn’t kill someone, he says, and don’t say you killed that guy in the cemetery, there was no report about it in the paper, they must have taken him with them.

I gave him half a clip, I protest.

How many hit him? John mocks.

The dying man, who has been in the corner the whole time, looks up at me. His flat cap is askew, shotgun by his side, he’s still soaked, but with blood, not rain.

Enough hit me, he says.

John snaps his fingers in front of my face.

Ignore him, he says. Continue.

Pat’s making me healthy, I say.

Sure, he’s in no fit state himself, he says.

He’s fine. End of conversation. All right?

Aye.

And now I have to see Ma, and I have to reveal the black secret at the heart of the Troubles.

That’s ok, just don’t say that thing again.

What thing?

I am the Last Incarnation of Vishnu, the Avenger, Storm Bringer, Lord of Death.

Ok. I won’t, I say, and pause for effect and then announce: I am the Last Incarn—

He turns off the light….

Ma is in the ground six weeks, and I’m on the Scotch Quarter being interviewed. They’re accepting my application to join the police. It has annoyed my lefty, progressive father, and that’s the beauty of the thing.

“Alex, we always want someone who has experience of the law and your A levels are outstanding, do you have anything you want to say?”

Do I have anything I want to say?

My eyes fluttering…

The bedroom spinning.

Pat gives me the bucket and I throw up.

“Neither poppy nor mandragora will ever medicine to thee that sweet sleep which thou hadst yesterday.”

“What?”

“Not poppy, not mandragora (whatever that is) will give me that sweet sleep of yesterday. I see that now. Heroin takes, never gives. That and that alone can explain so many mistakes since coming to America.”

“And you say heroin is to blame?”

“Yes.”

“But earlier you said heroin saved your life?”

“It did.”

“How?”

Like this:

I’d been a policeman for nearly six years. A full detective for three. I had gone straight into homicide. As Commander Douglas of the Samson Inquiry will tell you, this is practically unheard of. Being groomed, and I knew it. I was being used, but I wanted to be used, I wanted to make my way up. There were factions within the RUC that didn’t like the way things were. Fine, use me to further your ends. My talents, my skill. My techne.

All the way to the black heart of the Troubles.

A secret. Ostensibly, the rival paramilitary forces of the Protestants and the Catholics, the UDA and the IRA, were deadly enemies; but in the late eighties and early nineties, while they were killing each other in bombings, shootings, massacres, something brought them together.

Heroin.

Ireland was an island and it was impossible to get drugs there, especially when the paramilitaries had a thing for killing drug dealers and proving that they were as legitimate of respect as the police. But in 1993 at a secret meeting in Jake’s Bar in Belfast, it was decided to divide up Ulster between them. Heroin was just too big a moneymaker to ignore. Had to be secret. Had to be hush-hush. The IRA’s backers in Boston and New York and San Francisco would have been upset if they had known the IRA was in the drug-dealing business. And the UDA’s backers in Belfast and Glasgow would have had similar qualms.

After six years as a police officer I was appointed DC/DS, Detective Constable/Drug Squad.

Heroin, the gateway drug, was giving the paramilitaries millions and they were still bombing bars and factories and driving people into their arms for protection. That was why people like Victoria Patawasti had to leave Northern Ireland in the first place.

Yes, thinking, remembering it.

Lying here, in this bed, Pat bringing me soup.

“Are you ok, son?”

“I’m ok, Pat. Hey, it’s snowing.”

“No. It isn’t, Alex. It’s just ash from the wildfire, don’t worry about it, just relax, they have it eighty percent contained.”

“Look, Pat, the snow,” I say, but he’s gone and it’s night. I put my head out the window and the snow stings me in the iris making tears that skitter down the lines of least resistance on my face, half-freezing before they slide off my chin.

I can stare right through the clouds, through the dark. The snow is coming not from the sky but from the blue-faced moon, where the Celts believed the dead go. You sent it, Ma. Drizzling from the ether and the high atmosphere and down the roof onto this bed. It moistens my lips.

Morning.

“Eat your soup,” Pat says, and kisses me on the forehead.

“The case,” I tell him.

I followed it for months, it wasn’t that important, but it led to a suspect. Was it all a setup? My mentor was Chief Superintendent William McConnell. Big man, forties, old school. I trusted him.

“Alex, follow this where it leads, I’ll back you up.”

“I will, sir. I will.”

Stakeouts, undercover, but more the paper trail. Made an arrest. Stuart Robinson, a CPA. Ha. Just like how they got Capone. Does no one ever learn the lessons of history? I cracked him, I broke him, I trapped him in his own lies. He gave me names and I found it out. It was waiting to be found out. I don’t flatter myself. I saw it, a black secret. The IRA, the sworn enemies of the police, worked with a tiny corrupt unit within the police to control the flow of heroin into Ireland. The IRA and dirty cops. The bad guys and the good. Samson was on the right track. Buck McConnell, Commander Douglas were on the right track. It was all true. It went to the highest levels of the cops. Dangerous information. And what did I do, reading the accounts, that rainy night in Carrickfergus in my apartment overlooking the marina. What did I do?

I could take the evidence outside the RUC, to Special Branch in England, and forever live my life a fugitive, knowing that one day they’d get to me, they always do.

One bright morning in Perth, Australia, I go out to get my paper and a man with an Irish accent says hello, Alexander, and shoots me in the head.

Or I could bury the case, pretend it never happened.

Maybe I am a coward. I sat on it, in indecision, and that night…

Pat comes in with tea. Chitchat. I stroke my beard. I have a beard again. It’s been days. Weeks?

“You were saying?” Pat asks, liking when I talk, he says it helps me.

“That night…”

Heavy fog had smothered the wind and for once the gossipy yachts, dinghies, and small craft were silent.

My apartment at the marina. The quiet woke me. Gulls and distant foghorns up in Belfast. I sat in the bed and weighed my options. I was sweating, afraid. Death and exile on the one hand, or do nothing and forever live in shame. I heard the sound of hobnail boots on the marina pontoons. I grabbed my service revolver, but I put it down again.

The interrogating room. Classic twist. The roles reversed.

“I’m saying nothing until I see a lawyer.”

“You won’t be seeing a lawyer, Alex, you’re being held under the Prevention of Terrorism Act.”

“I want to speak to Buck McConnell.”

“Chief Superintendent McConnell has taken early retirement as of this morning.”

And I knew if I blabbed they’d kill me. They suspected that I knew the names of the corrupt cops but if I confirmed it, I’d be dead. They held me for two days and I said nothing and they released me. It gave them and me time to think.

What do I do, go to Scotland Yard, Special Branch, to the newspapers? I’d be hunted, killed. Say nothing, wait for the shoe to drop, I’d be hunted, killed. Run? Where?

I walked home from the barracks, afraid of every passing car.

Yes…

Pat sponges me down and cleans me off. Gives me green tea that he says is loaded with antioxidants, I throw it up. Why was it so hard going off junk when I wasn’t a junkie? Pat helps me to the toilet and I drizzle diarrhea and sob.

The bed.

The apartment overlooking the boats. Death one way. Death the other. Racking my squirreled-up brains.

And I hit upon a solution.

A third way.

Brilliant. The scourge would save me. The biter bit.

I found my undercover stash and like I’d watched, but never done, I injected myself with heroin and tracked up and down my arm until it looked like I was a junkie. Hit, rest, hit, rest, needle marks. And then I signed into the police station, broke into the evidence room, and got caught stealing half a click of heroin under my jacket. I was arrested on the spot. They found the track marks and it was such an obvious cliché, they bought it, the drug squad officer who uses. Maybe to establish credibility with dealers undercover, maybe because he was tempted, maybe he was weak. But it happened. Pathetic. Caught fucking red-handed. Where do these eejits come from?

And the higher-ups saw too. I was a junkie drug-squad officer. Caught stealing. How to handle it? Prosecute me?

No.

I would resign in disgrace, my file would be closed, we would hush it up.

Perfect. If I shut up and behaved myself, we’d leave it at that. And if I tried to whistleblow, I would have no credibility, no one would believe me, a junkie peeler caught stealing ketch from the police evidence room.

No need to kill me now. I wasn’t blabbing, I wasn’t going to anyone. I could never make my case. I had a record and no moral weight and I would live.

I had saved my life. And every day I kept using and I kept buying and I was safe.

Heroin had saved my life.

Or it had for six months till Commander Douglas from the Samson Inquiry came along and made me an offer I had to refuse….

Pat nods. Rambling and arse backward, but Pat has got the gist of it.

“So why can’t you go home now?” he asks.

“They think Commander Douglas will compel me to testify anyway, my evidence alone would not be credible, but it will add to the overwhelming weight of evidence Samson has compiled. They have to plug the hole in every dyke. Have to kill me, just in case. I’m not safe anywhere.”

“That’s why, Alexander, it’s better that you stay here and do nothing and get well,” Pat says.

“Pat, I have nothing there, I have nothing here. The reason I’m getting well, the reason I’m quitting junk, is so that I can fucking shoot Charles Mulholland, the killer of my two friends. Don’t you see, man’s crazy. Gotta be stopped. I’ve got to do it before the announcement on August sixth, before he gets to run for Congress. If I can do it, I can wipe the slate clean.”

Pat wipes my brow and cleans me with a sponge. Spoons tea into my mouth and shakes his head.

“Alex, the announcement was yesterday. You’ve been here for ten days. It’s too late. Congressman Wegener has already announced that this will be his last term. The mayor of Fort Collins isn’t entering the race. It’s a coronation. Charles Mulholland will be running for the GOP nomination unopposed. It’s all over. It’s too late. Let it go.”

“What? Too late? Oh yeah, I forgot, I forgot, that’s not the plan, new plan, kill him at the fund-raiser, kill him then.”

“Madness,” Pat mutters. “You didn’t listen to me before, listen to me now.”

I owed Pat a lot. He had operated on my leg to remove a shotgun pellet and then kept me alive despite the fact that I’d been suffering hypothermia, shock, blood loss, and then junk withdrawal. Pat was no surgeon, either, a paramedic, and paramedics aren’t trained for that kind of thing. But he’d done enough. And in any case, I didn’t hear him. I was taking advice from a higher authority. The verse of the Gita echoing in my skull: O Arjuna. Why give in to this shameful weakness? You who would be the terror of thine enemies.

The terror of thine enemies.

It had taken several more days until I felt confident about walking the streets of Fort Morgan again. I had kicked heroin and my leg was healed and I could walk and run. We had looked out for dodgy characters, but there were none. The hired guns had seen me sink in the South Platte and, as Pat says, but for the two years of drought and the river’s historic low level, I surely would have drowned.

But, anyway, I was in the clear. They thought I was dead for the second time. You can’t ignore a chance like that. My next move was the story on Channel 9. Charles was having a fund-raiser, a summer “white attire only” ball at the Eastman Ballroom in Denver. It showed Charles’s savvy. The historic Eastman Ballroom hadn’t been used for several years, everybody said a big event like this might help keep away the developers. Regardless. That’s where I would set the world to rights.

And I was certain about Charles and I knew it was him, but one thing troubled me still. What had happened in the cemetery made no sense. Charles would never have hired contract killers to ambush me. First of all, how could he have met them? Every third hit man in America is an under-cover FBI special agent. Second, as I’d thought at the time, what was to stop them blackmailing Charles once he became famous?

Something wasn’t right.

So, free of junk for the first time in nearly a year, I told Pat, “We have to go back to Denver.”

He protested, raged, refused.

We packed our stuff. Rode the bus, arrived at Denver, took a taxi to Pat’s old apartment building. The Ethiopians were gone, the lobby smelled of urine and was filled with garbage. Someone had tried to break the new locks on the inner door but fortunately had not succeeded.

We settled into Pat’s place. I couldn’t go back to the apartment where John had been killed….

And the world harsher. Denver, a big, hot, unpleasant city, and I got hungry now and I could read people when they were angry and I couldn’t ignore filth and dirt. Ketch softened the edges of everything, soothed you, blurred things like an impressionist painting. With ketch, Streisand was always singing and Vaseline was always on her lens.

I researched the stories of Robert, Charles, and Amber Mulholland. Old-fashioned police work. Phone calls to Harvard, to Cutter and May law firm, to the Mulholland Trust. Legwork at the Denver Public Library.

Robert and Charles checked out. They left traces all over the papers. Well known. The kids of a multimillionaire. Father divorced, the trust funds, the private schools, the Ivy League education, both PhDs in economics/political science. There were no surprises.

The surprise reserved for Amber Mulholland.

Hardly any information at all under that name. Her wedding in The Denver Post and The New York Times, but very little else. I remembered that photograph in the yearbook in her apartment. During her first year at Harvard, she had changed her name from Amber Doonan to Amber Abendsen. Now, why had she done that? She had mentioned some kind of problem with her father. But it had puzzled me at the time. Which was her real name? There was an easy way to find out….

I put on a shirt and tie and showed up with a dozen white roses at the nursing home Amber’s mother was housed at on Pennsylvania Street.

A very young security guard with a buzz cut.

“Yeah, maybe you can help me, I’ve got roses for a Mrs. Doonan, but then that’s crossed out and it says Mrs. Abendsen?” I said in my best approximation of an American accent.

The guy barely looked at me.

“Room 201,” he said.

“What name is it?” I asked.

“You had it the first time,” he said.

The home was upscale. Plush carpets, a mahogany handrail, nurses in crisp white uniforms. I knocked on 201. I went in. A frail, silver-haired old lady, sitting in a chair, looking out the window, stroking a sweater curled in her lap like a cat.

“I’ve got some flowers for you,” I said.

She didn’t turn around. Didn’t look up.

“Flowers,” I said again, but she didn’t even appear to be aware of my presence in the room. How old did Amber say she was? Sixty-eight? She seemed just a little older, but clearly, the disease had hit her hard. There was no way I could ask her anything but there was no point in wasting an opportunity. I put the flowers down and scouted the room. A few pictures, prints. Cautiously at first, I opened her chest of drawers. Amber’s mother didn’t move.

Old-lady clothes, adult diapers, nothing special, but in the top of a cupboard that she couldn’t reach — personal effects. China figurines, Hummel characters, bits of crystal, a few postcards. Several from Amber. Nothing of interest until I found an envelope filled with papers. The mother lode. Literally. Her birth certificate, born Louise Abendsen, Knoxville, Tennessee, 1927, her high school graduation certificate, her marriage license to Sean Doonan on October 31, 1955, and divorce papers from him on January 1, 1974, when Amber would have been about eight or nine.

Louise stared out the window, not stirring as I looked at this, the most significant piece of information so far. For on the divorce papers it said “Custody to the father, Sean Doonan, on the grounds of Louise Doonan’s present incarceration at the Huntsville State Correctional Facility.” The divorce papers made a big play out of the fact that Mrs. Doonan had gone to prison three times in the previous ten years for shoplifting, petty theft, drunkenness, and other crimes that the papers said “were signs of an unbalanced temperament.” The papers also made a point of explicitly denying “Mrs. Doonan’s claims that Sean Doonan was in any way involved in organized crime.”

“Flowers,” Louise said, not moving from her spot at the window.

I said nothing.

“Flowers,” she said again.

She was getting agitated. Time to go. I had plenty here to work with anyway. The information almost made me feel sorry for Amber. Screwed-up mother, dodgy father. I put the envelope back. I looked at Louise. I knew I couldn’t leave the flowers, in case someone wondered where they’d come from, so I took them with me and dumped them in a trash can down the hall. I felt bad. The guard didn’t look up as I walked out.

The rest of the pieces weren’t difficult to fill in. The New Jersey and, indeed, the New York papers had heard of Sean Doonan. A notable, but unindicted, member of the Irish mob in Union City. He had been implicated on several counts of union fraud, numbers rackets, protection rackets. He had never been convicted of anything.

After their divorce, Amber had gone to live with him full-time. She had clearly run a little wild. Amber Doonan’s name showed up in the Union City Gazette in connection with arrests for vandalism and car theft. I had interlibrary loan at the Denver Public Library get me a photocopy of the relevant issues of the Gazette. A grainy black-and-white photo that showed a defiant, pretty punk girl with a pierced nose and a shaved head.

Amber, however, had either done brilliantly on her SATs or her da had pulled strings, for she had been accepted to Harvard. As I’d already discovered, in her second year Amber began calling herself Amber Abendsen, her mother’s maiden name. Young Ms. Abendsen won a Boston Drama Festival Prize, and I even found a photograph in The Boston Globe that showed a girl with long blond hair in a Gucci blouse. Neither her father nor her mother attended Amber’s Harvard graduation, something two of her college classmates commented on when I phoned them. It didn’t surprise me now.

It seemed that Amber had reinvented herself in Boston. She had disowned her parents. Shanty Irish mobster dad, convict, drunken ma. She had made herself anew. She was moving in different social circles, ashamed of where she’d come from. She’d removed that harp tattoo. Cleaned up her elocution. But you could take the girl out of the bog, but not the bog out of the girl. The stealing of the tip money, the random fucks, she had a little throw-back in her. Or was that a racist thing to say? A classist thing. Maybe.

Regardless, from The Denver Post, it appeared that neither of Amber’s parents came to her wedding. Probably Charles understood why Amber wanted it this way. At the time of the wedding, her ma was back in jail and her father had been on TV as part of a prolonged trial that had just collapsed. His face had again been in the New York papers. Indeed, Amber’s father, Sean Doonan, was a nephew of Seamus Patrick Duffy, who was now the reputed leader of the Irish mob in New York City.

The more clear blue water between her and him the better, if she wanted to move in the dizzy circles around Charles Mulholland.

And all this would have been irrelevant but for one thing.

Now I probably knew where the gunmen in the park had come from.

My phone call must have precipitated it. Scared them. Charles and Amber at their wits’ end. Charles had messed up; even though he’d stuck a knife in my heart, I wasn’t dead. And Amber knew that to protect her husband and her future there was only one thing to do. She had to contact dear old Dad. It was possible. Why not? It seemed she had been telling the truth when she told me she didn’t have a relationship with her father. Eight years of estrangement would have had to come to an end. She needed his help. She needed someone in whom she could place absolute trust, who would not blackmail her and Charles, who could supply three professional assassins to meet her husband’s tormentor in Fort Morgan, Colorado. Charles had taken care of everything, but this loose end had to be taken care of by someone else.

So maybe she had picked up the phone. Knew that he would trade it for future favors, but even so. Dad I need your help….

So it was another fuckup on my part, I’d arranged the meeting in the graveyard a day in advance, plenty of time for Doonan to fly a hit team to Denver, to drive to Fort Morgan, to scout the territory, to lay the trap. What a fool I’d been. And perhaps Charles had bullied her, frightened her. If I was right, it must have taken some persuading to get her to talk to her da, especially after all she had gone through to be rid of the past. But she had agreed. The future, too important. A politician’s wife. A rising star. Yes, Charles, I’ll call Da, he’ll take care of it, he’ll kill Alex.

Thanks, Amber. I am not one to hold a grudge. But, my dear, prepare your screams. Your Jackie Kennedy face. In three days Charles is going to be lying beside you with a bullet in his skull.

I needed a weapon, so I went to see my old dealer, the Mexican kid who worked behind the Salvation Army shelter on Colfax. Entire books have been written about the relationship between a user and his dealer. Burroughs, De Quincey. Lou Reed has written songs about it. Mine was uncomplicated. I liked Manuelito. I had quit now and no one was interested in ketch in Denver, so I didn’t blame him when he gave me a bit of the old cold shoulder at first when I went to see him.

“Manuelito,” I said with a big grin.

“Manuel to you,” he said sourly. His baby face trying to force a frown.

“Listen, I quit smack, don’t bring me down.”

He shook his head.

“Man, you know, heroin isn’t even worth the risks anymore.”

“I know,” I said, and we chatted about the dreadful state of affairs the world was in when kids wanted to do crack and then go out and rob some old lady, rather than taking honest-to-God Afghani horse, which was so pure these days you could smoke it, mellow out, chill, harm nobody but yourself. On the subject of the dangerous world we lived in, I told him I needed a piece and he told me about an unlikely place to buy one.

“There’s a guy called Tricky, lives a couple of blocks away from the police headquarters on Federal Plaza, I’ll take you over.”

We went to see Tricky. A wiry, high-strung Guatemalan kid who had so much energy he made me nervous. Also a bit tense to be looking at shotguns, Armalites, pistols, and a machine gun and thinking about committing a political murder a hundred yards from the police HQ and a divisional office of the FBI. Tricky wanted me to take the machine gun off his hands, but in the end I settled for a long-nosed.38 revolver similar to a gun I’d had in the peelers. Stolen from a gun dealer’s in Mexico, Tricky said. As good as untraceable. Pistol in hand, I thanked the two boys and went back home.

Pat wasn’t doing so well these days. He told me not to worry, saying that some weeks you were good and some weeks you were bad. His doc told him to expect that. It would be a sine curve of health, up, down, up, until the final cataclysmic plunge.

He coughed most of the time now and as I got stronger and put on weight, he balanced me out, getting paler and losing weight. Most nights now I fed him soup and did my best to keep his apartment clean.

Pat and I were really getting on and I felt a bit guilty about leaving him. But leave him I must. Either for jail or the afterlife or maybe even for Ireland. In case of the latter, I had changed my airline ticket once again, deciding that if I survived the assassination, I’d fly to Dublin that night on my real passport.

And I might shoot Charles and get out, but more likely I’d be killed at the scene or arrested. Congressman Wegener would be there and a senator from one of the logging states and they were bound to have protection. Peelers and FBI and maybe a few private security guards.

“Hey, Pat, does Colorado have the death penalty?”

“No,” Pat said, with a little cough. “But you won’t get that far,” he added with an ironic grin.

He was wrapped in his blankets. He had a cold. A cold can kill an AIDS patient. He’d given me the list of numbers to call if we had to run him up to Saint Joseph’s.

“Do you want some tea?” I asked. Pat shook his head.

“Did you take your AZT?”

“Everybody I know on AZT is dead,” he said.

“Pat, do us all a favor and take your prescription. I don’t need you dying on me.”

“I’ll take it, don’t freak. I’ll be fine, I’m a survivor,” he said, his eyes lighting up to convince me….

Two days before the fund-raiser.

Pat was very sick in the morning and I didn’t get out to inspect the Eastman Ballroom until the afternoon. Six blocks north of Colfax on Comanche Street. A large, boxy building with grille-covered, high-arched windows. Plain all the way around, but at the front a lovely art deco facade: marble columns that held up a statue of two seminaked figures who were either ballerinas or angels or prisoners on a starvation diet. It was a beautiful structure, though, elegant in its simplicity.

The ballroom sat on its own block, opposite an empty ball-bearing factory and an old warehouse. The closest apartment building was four blocks south and derelict. I couldn’t quite understand how the neighborhood had worked; the sidewalks were large, the streets wide. No traffic, no people, no apartment buildings. Perhaps this had been the equivalent of a factory town and when the factory had closed, it had killed the neighborhood completely. Definitely an area waiting for redevelopers to swoop in and convert everything into condominiums.

The CAW “white attire” ball was by ticket only, but I felt I couldn’t take the risk of attempting to buy a ticket, even under a fake name, since I’d have to have it sent to my Colfax address. Someone would put two and two together.

I’d have to find another way in.

I stared at the Eastman Ballroom entrance. A dozen steps led up to a set of double doors under the columns. There’d be ticket takers up there, and if I tried to bluff my way past, I knew it would all go wrong from the start. If I tried to shoot my way in, that would give Charles plenty of time to get to cover. I walked all the way around the building again and leaned against the wall of the old ball-bearing plant.

A dry, sunny Denver day and the factory made big, bold shadows on the road and sidewalk. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to actually go inside the ballroom, have a check and see what the layout was. But then, what if there was a guard or a cleaner or even someone from CAW making preparations? Why show my face to a security guard when I didn’t have to?

I took a final look and walked away, in case people started taking an interest in me. I hadn’t come up with anything. Maybe I’d try and bluff my way in regardless, I’d say I’d lost my ticket. We’d see. The one thing I now definitely decided that I wasn’t going to do was to wait for him on the sidewalk while his limo or taxi pulled up. Since there were absolutely no pedestrians in this weird part of town, I’d be totally suspicious.

The getaway was another problem. Car could get roadblocked in the nasty Denver traffic, so I went to Kmart and bought a hundred-dollar mountain bike and a fifty-dollar lock and chain. If I could get out of the ballroom somehow, I’d bike quickly to Colfax, and once on Colfax, I’d be safe.

If I could get the fuck out.

We didn’t talk the whole day. Pat tried to make me eggs for dinner, but I took over the cooking. He couldn’t eat, I couldn’t eat. When night fell, I dressed in the white suit I had bought from the Arc Thrift Shop for five dollars. A third of the price of the dry cleaning bill. I grabbed the bike from the hall. Pat looked up from the Rocky Mountain News with a face full of tears and said:

“Have you got your passport?”

“I do.”

“Your tickets?”

“Aye.”

“Your gun?”

“Yes.”

“And you want me to toss the rest of your stuff?”

“Yes.”

He sat for a minute, swallowed. Now even his hair was graying. I went and sat beside him.

“Alex, there’s nothing I can say to stop you?”

“No, Pat.”

“Ok, then, give me a hug.”

We hugged, Pat kissed me on the cheek.

“I’m worried about you, Pat,” I said.

“Fuck that, mate, worry about yourself, I’m not dead yet,” he said.

“If the police come for you, Pat?”

“I’ll handle it, Alex, I’ll be ok,” he said, his face in a fixed grin that neither of us believed. I nodded, stood, and looked at him, I didn’t want to be talked out of it. I didn’t want Pat to convince me of anything, but I needed something. I needed some word.

“Pat, you don’t have to tell me I’m doing the right thing, I know you don’t think I am doing the right thing, but at least tell me you understand. You knew John, you saw what Mulholland did to him. And Victoria and maybe another girl. You know that. Tell me at least that you understand.”

Pat looked at me, smiled weakly.

“I understand,” he said softly, tears streaming down his cheeks.

I picked up my backpack and left the apartment for the last time. I never saw him again….

I rode the bike along Colfax and up to Comanche Street. At the ball-bearing factory, I dismounted. It was darker now, and with no streetlights I would have been practically invisible, apart from the white shirt, white tie, white seventies suit, and white pimp hat. And I still hadn’t figured out a way of getting into the CAW party.

I locked the bike. Hid my bag with my change of clothes and passport.

I walked to the Eastman Ballroom. A lot of activity at the front of the building. Town cars, limos, taxis. Rich white people getting out, the women wearing too much jewelry, the men paunchy, older.

I walked around the back, waited, tried to think. Maybe get in one of the fire exits. I skulked in the shadows of the derelict factory, my mouth dry.

An hour went by. I didn’t even have smokes.

Getting tense. Sooner or later, I’d have to go around the front and try to bluff my way in. I didn’t want to, I figured it wouldn’t work, but soon I’d have no choice.

I counted a final fifteen minutes on the watch. I could hear a band playing inside.

I started making my way to the front of the building and just then I got a break. An emergency exit opened and a man in a dinner jacket came out for a smoke. He left the exit open, lit his cigarette, and then decided to take a leak up against the dimly lit ball-bearing factory wall. I crossed the street out of the shadow.

“Hi,” he said.

I nodded.

I went in the open emergency exit, walked down a concrete corridor, pulled a door, was in the ballroom.

A large floor, a closed balcony, a band up on the stage, a chandelier, tables ringing the ballroom with waiters in dinner jackets bringing hors d’oeuvres and booze. About two hundred and fifty people. Half of them dancing whitey fashion to light jazz and Muzak versions of Rat Pack standards. The rest sitting at tables or standing to the sides, chatting, flirting. White dresses, white suits, a couple of people in more creative white lab coats, white boiler suits. Dull as dishwater. Exactly the sort of thing you’d expect at a fund-raiser for an organization like the Campaign for the American Wilderness: middle-aged, wealthy, satisfied, not a person of color who wasn’t carrying a tray. Trophy wives and girlfriends. Grizzled men in their forties and fifties who had dodged the draft, made money in real estate, swung from left to right, and whose dream was to someday make the cover of Cigar Aficionado.

I zeroed in on a group of tables near the stage. Charles, sitting there in a white morning suit, Amber in a dazzling cream dress. Everyone in orbit about her. God, I’d forgotten how beautiful she was. I couldn’t see Robert or the retiring Congressman Wegener, though there was a fat man in a white vest, flanked by goons, so that was a possibility. The congressman had been getting death threats for his antigay stance. The guys with him might be armed. It wouldn’t matter, I’d be quick. Amber was talking to a man who looked so like her, aged thirty-five or forty years, that I knew instantly it was her father. He and a couple of hoods with him were wearing black jackets with a white buttonhole. It made them look like the wait staff. I smiled. I might have been right about my assessment. Maybe I’d brought them together. Having had to find men to kill me had been the great family rapprochement. Touching. The taller of the two goons looked like one of the shooters from Fort Morgan a few weeks ago.

A waiter came by with caviar on a piece of Melba toast.

“Sir?” he asked.

“Thanks,” I said, and forced myself to relax. I unclenched my fists and pretended to be looking at a large 1930s WPA mural of people dancing in various eras of history. I saw that the best route to Charles would be to avoid the dance floor and make my way clockwise through the crowd along the ballroom’s circumference.

Ok, no more dicking around, I told myself.

Now or never. I checked in my pocket for the gun and the smoke bombs from Pat’s apartment. I pulled down my pimp hat and walked completely into the room….

Time slows. The world blurs. Movement. People. The disco lights come on. Snatches of conversation:

“Oh, he did it, O. J. killed her first and then the waiter…. Winter Park is so over….” “Not Heston, not Sinatra, the worst wig in television is Jack Horkheimer, he’s this astrology dude….” “Clinton will win for certain….” “Norm McDonald plays a great Bob Dole….”

Couples dancing. Perfume on the women. The band onstage. The lights. The people. But I can see only one. Charles, talking to a man who is doing something to a microphone stand. There are to be speeches later.

Well, I can safely say the audience isn’t going to have to suffer through that.

I ease my way through the crowd.

No one pays me the slightest bit of attention.

Closer.

Closer.

I get bumped by a flapper.

“Sorry,” she says, gives me a winning smile.

“Not at all.”

Twenty feet from his table.

I feel for the gun again. Swallow. I feel sick.

Time slows further.

My legs begin to tremble. Can I do this? Can I kill another person? Didn’t I kill that guy in the cemetery? I had the hate. I had it. Victoria alone would have been sufficient. But John and possibly that girl Maggie too? So close.

Fifteen feet. No dancers between me and him. I can see his eyes, his confident sneer. A direct line, a clear shot. He’s standing next to Amber. He scratches his ear, takes a drink of champagne. His last. My veins are throbbing, I can count my heartbeats. One, two, three, four…

I blink. Loosen my fingers. Sweat in beads rolling down my palms. My knee hurts. I have stopped breathing.

Ten feet.

I touch the.38. I cock it in my pocket. I force my legs to stop shaking. The metal of the gun is warm, the grip drenched with sweat. Did I load it? Of course I did. I pull it out.

Time stops.

I grin.

I’m really here. This is really happening. This is it. It’s too late now. You can do what you like, Charles. Grab your rosary. Sing your songs. Your existence is hereby erased.

People are moving behind me, talking. The music plays. A drum solo. The room sways slightly.

My throat is dry. I try to swallow, but when you’re not breathing, you can’t swallow.

Charles leans forward to hear something, I begin to lift the gun.

Charles turns his head slightly.

I momentarily catch his eye.

My grin widens.

He looks away. There’s a lot of things going on in this room.

Charles says something to a man with enormous whiskers. The man looks puzzled. Charles has begun an anecdote or joke, but he has lost the plot, he looks confused, he begins to stutter, like his brother. I bring the.38 to full extension, Charles’s confused face in the middle of the sight.

Amber leans in. Charles relaxes. Amber, beautiful and clever and hard. She says something and the man laughs and Charles looks at his feet and perks up and finishes his joke. And suddenly I see the whole dynamic of their relationship. Everything depends upon her. She’s not just the one behind the scenes. She’s the one that gives him confidence. She’s the one that lifts him up. It’s her. The heroin concealed it from me.

And then the gun feels weak in my grip as suddenly I see it all.

It’s Amber. Of course. It’s her. Jesus.

Charles could never have killed anyone. Too effete, delicate, too sensitive, he wouldn’t have had the bottle. And Amber under the ketch already told me as much. She told me everything already. I just didn’t see it. That perfect skin, that razor smile, those quirks, that steely look.

It’s her.

Charles probably never killed anyone in his life. Not John, not Victoria. Probably not Maggie, either. If it was one of those lacrosse boys, it was more likely Houghton. Charles just doesn’t seem the type. Of course, the blackmail game would still be on. Charles meets Maggie, Houghton shows up. There’s an incident. Houghton’s word against his. But no, I don’t think he did it. Charles is no killer.

Not even bloody John. I had assumed a man had done it, but why? Look at her. Strong, fast, fit, lithe, a fucking martial artist. Why not her? Tough enough and lucky enough to get one blow right in the heart.

Amber stroking her hair in midflirt with the powerful man next to Charles, who I recognize as a famous senator. And then I laugh. I really laugh. She had outplayed me from the very beginning. She had seduced me, to enable me to unveil myself. She had been hot and cold, all to get me off my guard, to find me out, make me slip. She was the detective, trying to figure out who I was and what I was doing here. Maneuvering me into a situation so that I would slip, reveal that, yes, I did know Victoria, I was on her trail. Ha. Me thinking I was mining her for information and all the time it was the other way around.

Amber, her mother a thief, her father a player. School of hard knocks. A real piece of work. Her body was the weapon she had used on Victoria and me, but her mind was the really impressive instrument.

How long have I been standing here? With my arm outstretched and the big coat sleeve partially but not wholly concealing a gun held in my hand.

One second? Two?

But in that moment, that brief increment of time, I see everything. From its very beginnings. After years of paying off Alan Houghton, Charles confesses or lets slip to his wife about the blackmail. Amber knows Charles is her ticket from the shanty-Irish muck. An old-money WASP with political ambitions. There is only one thing to do. She decides to kill Houghton. The easy way would be to tell her da. But she’s burned that bridge. She will do this on her own. Her da is the past she’s escaping from. She will make her own future. She plans it all. She plans the murder. She’s learned well from her da’s success, her ma’s failures. Yes. Handle this on her own, keep Charles out of it, keep Dad out of it, she’ll do it by herself. Just as she worked hard to get into Harvard, reinvented herself, probably forced the coincidence whereby she and Charles would meet at Vail. This was one more obstacle to be overcome.

Yes.

Then Victoria Patawasti finds out about the slush fund. Victoria leaves a trail in the accounts. Charles notices that someone has been looking at the secret account file. He panics, tells his wife. Of course it could only be Victoria and silly, poor, doomed Victoria writes up her suspicions in her computer. Only Charles, Robert, and, what was that Klimmer said, yes, Mrs. Mulholland, only those three ever went into Victoria’s office. Amber has to know what Victoria knows. Seduces her, gets her to reveal her password and what she knows. And once the decision is made to kill Alan Houghton, Victoria has to die too. Victoria can’t be bought. Amber has to act quickly. Hector Martinez is working at the CAW offices. Maybe he drops his license, maybe she rifles through his wallet. It doesn’t matter, she gets the license and knows she can use it to set up an innocent man. She kills Houghton and Victoria on the same night, sets up Hector as a burglar. Brilliant.

Does Charles know about it all? He must have told her that someone had been looking at the secret account. Is he in on the murders? Did Amber tell him? Did he have anything to do with Maggie Prestwick’s death? Does it matter? I don’t think I even care now.

And only after she botched my murder did Amber see she was at the limit of her power. She needed professional killers to kill me. The risk of hiring unknowns — who could blackmail her — was too great. Who to turn to? Daddy. Because she needed him. Because blood was thicker than water. A rapprochement. Oh, Amber. It had to be you.

I move the gun sight from him to her.

And I hold it. Hold it. My finger on the trigger. The sight between her shoulder blades. For a second. Amber’s fair face. Her golden hair.

Beautiful.

Another long second.

A squeeze.

And then.

And then I release the tension on the trigger.

No, Amber, you will not make me do the wrong thing again. I was weak before. I failed. In Ireland. But not here. Not this time. Some other way.

I begin lowering the gun. A man at her dad’s table sees me, reaches inside his jacket, pulls something out.

I finally breathe.

A blast like a firecracker.

The man next to me is thrown backward into a woman holding a champagne glass. Blood gushes from his back. There is a ghastly silence and then people start to scream. The other man beside Amber’s father draws his gun, begins to shoot. The men next to the senator and the congressman pull out their guns, shoot across the room at Amber’s father’s table. Panicky fast shots thumping into the walls. Shooting from all directions, all around.

People begin screaming, diving for cover. At least half a dozen men now are shooting at once, seemingly at random, in a panic, at me, everywhere. Bullets from semiautomatics and big-caliber revolvers, the sound horrendous in the enclosed space of the ballroom. People yelling, terrified, running, trampling one another, falling to the floor. A bullet hits a spotlight and a fire starts behind the band. The fire alarm goes off.

Charles and Amber have dived to the floor.

I drop a smoke bomb.

Confusion, more gunshots.

The sprinklers start spraying water and the water makes the lights fuse, flicker, go out.

Now the screaming really starts.

Yellow emergency lights come on above the fire exits. I run for one.

I sprint across the darkened room, unhindered, untouched. Something comes whizzing over my head and crashes into the wall. There’s the sound of shooting and a yell to cease fire. Not an unarmed person left isn’t screaming, isn’t diving under the tables.

I push on a metal bar and the door flies open. I run down a corridor, open another fire door, and am suddenly out in the night. I hammer across the street to the ball-bearing factory. I wipe the gun clean and throw it through one of the broken factory windows. I tear off the white jacket and pants, change into jeans, an Eddie Vedder shirt, black jacket, sneakers. I unlock the bike, ride like crazy. I head east, I just keep going. I don’t look back.

In two minutes, I don’t hear the fire alarm, I don’t hear anything, I’m on big empty streets going anywhere. A fire truck shoots past me heading for the Eastman Ballroom.

I ride through the unfamiliar landscape of northeast Denver until I come to a bus stop. I ditch the bike, I get the bus to the airport bus stop.

I take the airport bus to Denver International.

That big teepee structure. The windows. The sun behind the Rocky Mountains. The blue sky. The stars. I queue up at the British Airways desk. I get my boarding card for the direct flight from Denver to London.

I find the toilet and throw up. I wash my face. I smack the hand dryer off the wall. What a disaster. What a terrible balls-up. I go to the gate.

I get on the plane. Sit in my seat. The plane idles for a long time, gets delayed, loses its place in the queue. The captain explains why. Something mechanical. We wait. My heart going like a rivet gun. I bite my nails. We finally get another takeoff slot. The plane taxis, turns, roars down the runway. Lifts into the night, leaving behind the city, the plains, and, eventually, Newfoundland and then North America itself.

John’s body in the landfill in Aurora and Amber safe and alive. Unharmed, and as strong and as beautiful as ever.