Simple Simon

Chapter Twenty One Marked

Of all places, they met in a toy store, Pedanski arriving looking like death not even warmed over, and Folger with wonder plastered on his face as they strolled down the aisle where video game cartridges were conveniently placed at eye level for a nine year old.

“Don’t tell me,” Folger began. “You know this aisle well.”

Pedanski actually smiled. It did not feel right. “Vik’s pulling half of my shift.”

“Sounds good,” Folger said. “Listen, thanks for listening the other day. I know I shouldn’t have dumped all that—”

“This has to stop,” Pedanski said, cutting Folger off, a crack in his voice. He turned toward a row of game cartridges and took a box covered by colorful, action packed art in hand and tried to pretend that he was really interested in the drivel presented in small print.

Folger stopped mid-aisle and stepped up close behind Pedanski. “What happened?”

“Just another call,” Pedanski said. He replaced the box and took another. His eyes were puddled, and his hand pushed them up awkwardly and wiped the gathering tears before they could fall. “I didn’t plan on this when I came to Z, when I came to work for Mr. Kudrow.”

“None of us did,” Folger concurred.

A small furry creature on a jet powered tricycle zoomed over rocky terrain on the box Pedanski focused on now. “What you told me was happening to the FBI agent…”

“Jefferson,” Folger prompted while Pedanski sniffled.

“That shouldn’t happen.”

Folger’s eyes drifted to the far end of the aisle, past a young boy trying out a new game on a display set right at his level. Price was mentioned nowhere. It was not for him to consider. Others would worry about that. “A lot of things shouldn’t happen.”

“Well,” Pedanski began, thumbs tapping on hollow cardboard, “I’m done with it. I’m out. I’m leaving.”

“You can’t,” Folger said, looking back to Pedanski now. When he’d spilled his guts to the younger man in the Puzzle Center, confessed his and Kudrow’s sins freely, there was one he’d left out. “He won’t let you.”

“And how can he stop me?”

“He can kill you. Just like he did Dean.”

A shudder burned through Pedanski’s upper body, and he slowly turned toward Folger. “He what?”

“He killed him. He shot him because he said he was selling information to someone outside. Espionage.” Folger felt his right eyelid begin to shake and put a pair of fingers to it. “That can carry the death penalty, you know.”

It was a weak attempt at humor, not even gallows humor. Induced by nerves, by fear.

Craig? Pedanski should have heard what Folger said and been rocked with disbelief. He was not. He could believe it. He could see Mr. Kudrow doing just that. And what frightened him more, about himself as much as any potential threat, was that he could have imagined Kudrow doing this even before the present situation developed. And he had respected him for that dedication to a cause.

Now he reviled him, and a little piece of the naïveté in his own makeup.

Leo Pedanski’s thumbs suddenly pressed hard on the game box, collapsing it upon itself, his fingers digging through from the opposite side, punching through the thin shell until he ripped it completely in half and let it fall to the floor. It felt good.

But not good enough.

“Fuck him,” Pedanski said in a voice that gained resonance deep in his chest. “I want to see him hurt.”

“I understand how you feel,” Folger said. He truly did. And the anger, beyond being healthy, as almost everyone who’d ever had difficulty expressing the emotion had been lectured, allowed focus on a target for the desired wrath that one could dream of. If only dream of.

But Folger sensed, saw in Pedanski’s profile, in the stony flex of the jaw muscles, in the glassy sheen over the one eye visible, in the unseen grinding of the teeth, that he was doing more than dreaming. He was visualizing what pain he could inflict on G. Nicholas Kudrow as if he really was going to do it.

Pedanski showed Folger his face in its full, furious glory, and said, “I want to hurt him. I want to ruin him.”

“How, Leo? He’s made himself clean. He always has. You and I, we’re civil servants who can make a lot of wild claims, but we have nothing concrete to back those up. Hell, I’m on the edge, drinking at work. For all I know he already may have psych reports on me that say just that.”

Pedanski thought, his mind working as it did when tricking algorithms to vex the most determined cryptanalyst, passing over what was useless to consider, looking not only at the likely path of the equation’s potential, but at the less likely, and the unlikely. And the simply nonexistent.

The back door.

If you can’t beat ‘em, a drunk in a bar had told him once, get someone else to beat ‘em for you.

“Rothchild,” Pedanski said, no revelrous joy in his voice, no satisfied glint in his eye.

Folger thought he understood and shook his head. “He won’t help us. He sold his soul to Kudrow long ago.”

“Maybe he’d sell it again,” Pedanski suggested, and through the machinations of Folger’s expression, his eye steadying even, he could see that this time he truly did understand. But that did not erase the doubt or alter reality.

“Who’d listen?” Folger asked.

“I think I know,” Pedanski answered.

It only took him a few minutes to convince Folger. The decision was not hard to make. Anger had steeled their conviction.

In the mirror she studied the mark, turning her head away from the too-bright lamp embedded in the ceiling of the hotel bathroom, and then toward it, comparing how her left cheek looked in differing levels of light.

Like hell in either, Keiko Kimura decided, and covered the offending mark, a tear in the skin caused by the shattering wood of the door scraping like sharp, hot rockets across her skin. It was red and raised, an inch and a half long if not two, the edges puffed pink like the anatomy between her legs, something she had studied in mirrors enough to draw a simile. Except this cleft cut into her face at a perfect diagonal beneath the left eye could not be used for purposes noble or pleasurable. It was a brand. And it would become a scar, she was certain.

“Damn fucking Joe,” she said to the mirror, drawing the image of Art Jefferson’s coarse dark face on the glass with her mind, and a second later driving the very real heel of her palm against the apparition, pieces of it falling away into the sink and dissolving as twinkling bits of silvery noise.

She looked at her hand and saw that a small slice had been cut into the thick meat at the base of the thumb, and that a smear of red was rising to a tiny crimson dome over the wound. She brought her hand up and pressed her lips over the cut, drawing what drained out of her back in over her tongue, all while she gazed at the starburst missing from the shattered mirror. Thinking, imagining what she would do to repay Art Jefferson for this mark. What more she would do than just kill him.

A bank of pay phones was cut into a wall outside a department store in the Oak Park Village Mall. Art chose an end unit and dialed the number before turning back so he could see Simon in the Nova parked five seconds away at a dead run. That was how he was seeing separation now. Not in distance, but in how long it would take him to get there.

The call he was making would bring that to an end. That was a hope tinged by regret.

One ring sounded, seeming louder than any he could recall before, and in the car Simon’s head was down, bobbing gently, the strange dark color of his hair lifting more pangs from low in Art’s gut. Maybe it could have been different. Maybe he could have prevented all this from happening. Maybe Simon Lynch could have had a good life, his own life, if only Art had seen more sooner. Had made the right connections.

Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

Ring number two passed, and as the third ring sounded, without taking his eyes off Simon, art pressed the number five, creating an annoying, sputtering jingle wrapped around a low howl in his ear, like a hundred mosquitoes vying for a choice vein above the lobe.

Someone answered as the abrasive tone faded.

“Yes?”

“I want to talk to Pritchard.”

It could not be called silence that followed, more a hum absent depth, but that lasted only a minute.

“I’m glad you called.”

“You said I would,” Art reminded him. “I’m ready to give him to you.”

Now the absence of sound was substantive, suggestive of thought. After a moment Pritchard said, “Do you remember what Simon built on the dresser?”

“Yes,” Art answered, his eyes angling down at the receiver, noting something in the way Pritchard spoke, in the preciseness, as if he’d expected this call and had committed what had to be said to memory. A recitation that, still, seemed lacking of substance, like slow water gliding over a smooth rock as a wispy thin sheen. Maybe it was his way. Maybe this was as hard for him as it was for Art.

“You’ve been, I take it.”

“I have,” Art confirmed.

“The area people usually gather is closed.”

“I’ve heard.” Being remodeled, Art knew from the papers, the Skydeck Observatory had been closed for weeks.

“Can you get there?”

An odd place to present Simon to those who would — and Art still had trouble keeping the cynic down so that he could believe — give him a new life. But this was their call. “When?”

“Nine tomorrow evening.”

“I can do that.”

“Good then.”

“Wait,” Art said. It was their call on place and time, but he did have one condition. He gave it to Pritchard not as a request.

“I guess we’ll have to manage that.”

“I guess you will.”

“Tomorrow, Agent Jefferson,” Pritchard said, then hung up.

Art put the phone back in its cradle and adjusted the baseball cap on his head, looking to the car and the small figure in the passenger seat. A little more than a day and Simon would be gone. He’d hardly known the kid at all.

Pritchard did not get up from the chair after hanging up. He sat as Sanders watched him, waiting for some words of direction, but after an awkwardly long time the younger man cleared his throat.

“You’ve been like this ever since you met Jefferson.”

“How’s ‘this’?”

“Contemplative,” Sanders explained. “Excessively.”

“Well, Mr. Sanders, you are one boldly observant young man.” And a correct one at that, Pritchard knew.

“What is it?”

“Something that Jefferson said.” Pritchard lifted a dead cigar from the pedestal ashtray next to his chair and slid it between his teeth. “This innocent is different. People will still want him. They’ll still look.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We’ll have to arrange for special handling. It can’t happen as Jefferson thinks it will.”

Sanders face belied his ignorance of Pritchard’s point.

“Sanders, I want you to leak the information to the opposition,” Pritchard directed.

The whites of Sander’s eyes grew around the dark centers until they looked like plates of alabaster china with dollops of thick gravy in the middle of each. “But that means they’ll know. They can stop it. I don’t understand, sir. I don’t—”

Pritchard lifted a hand. “Having people looking for the innocent won’t do. There has to be an absolute resolution.”

Sanders understood somewhat now. Exposure. It would mean the end of what they were, what they represented. But what was Mr. Pritchard thinking? How would alerting the opposition prevent that?

How was the question that Pritchard, former army Ranger, drill instructor, jump master at Fort Bragg, had been agonizing over through two sleepless nights, and two endless days. How to achieve an absolute resolution.

The answer he came up with was spawned by an old adage concerning absolutes or certainties. Death and taxes, he recalled. One was of no use to him. The other was Simon Lynch’s only hope.

As long as Art Jefferson behaved as Pritchard believed he would. If he did not, the hope for one would become the fate of both.

“This is what I expect to happen,” Pritchard began.