Small Town

thirty-eight

The Nancy Dee was still in its slip.

Buckram had figured it would be. The Carpenter would use darkness. He was, from all accounts, a man who shrank from the limelight and sought out the shadows. He’d almost certainly board the ship after the sun had set, when there was less light to be seen by and fewer eyes to see him. If he was going to take the boat out, he’d do so then. Or he’d keep his hands off the tiller and catch a few hours of sleep, leaving well before daybreak.

What was the best way to do this?

He could board the boat now. He’d had a glance at the lock on the cabin door earlier, and it hadn’t looked terribly challenging. And why should it be? Out on the water you worried about pirates, not burglars. He’d added a handcuff key to his key ring before he left the apartment, and while he was at it he included the flat strip of flexible steel that had opened more than a few doors for him over the years. He’d be inside the Nancy Dee’s cabin almost as quickly as if he had the key.

And then he’d be waiting there when the Carpenter showed up. He’d hear the man coming, feel the boat shift when he came on board, and have a gun in his hand when the man came through the cabin door. With the advantage of surprise, he’d have the son of a bitch collared and cuffed before he knew what was happening.

And if it was Shevlin?

Well, hell. He’d tell him he was under arrest for making everybody crazy, and then he’d relent and send him home to Helen Mazarin, which would be punishment enough.

But it wouldn’t be Shevlin. Shevlin was dead, he was sure of it, and the man who came into the cabin would be the man who’d killed him.

There were other approaches he could make. He could stake out the Boat Basin and grab the Carpenter as soon as he showed up. He might be hard to spot in a crowd, but he wouldn’t be in a crowd, he’d be by himself, heading for the pier.

Mr. Harbinger? No, don’t move, and keep your hands in plain sight. Down on the ground, hands behind your back...

Easier with two people, easier still with three or four. Hard to corner a man when you were by yourself. You could run at him full speed, tackle him without warning, but you ran the risk of bystanders misreading the situation and interfering — plus a whole lot of egg on your face if you tackled some visiting fireman from Waukegan.

And if the tackle wasn’t perfect, and if the Carpenter made a break for it, then where were you? Even if you were willing to shoot at him, against regulations for cops, flat-out illegal for a private citizen, you risked missing him and hitting somebody else.

No, the best thing was to lay in wait and take him by surprise.

Now?

Now the sun was still high in the sky, and hot enough to make him question the wisdom of the Kevlar vest. Riverside Park was a human beehive, swarming with joggers and skaters and parents pushing strollers and people walking dogs. Everybody on the Upper West Side who hadn’t escaped for the holiday weekend had apparently decided to come to the park for a breath of fresh air. There wasn’t any, not at the moment, but if some happened to blow down from Ontario, they were ready to grab their share of it.

Hard to spot anybody in that sea of people. He looked for a place to sit, passed up a bench he could have shared with a woman who was feeding pigeons, shared another with an Asian man who was reading a copy of El Diario.

He sat back, relaxed. But kept his eyes open.

The movies were better during the week.

The films, of course, were essentially the same, irrespective of the day or time they were shown. But the theaters served better as refuge and dormitory on weekday afternoons, when even the most popular films drew tiny audiences. Saturdays and Sundays attendance increased dramatically, which was good for the theater owners and the film studios, but not as good for the Carpenter.

Still, he’d learned how to manage. You showed up when the box office opened, bought a ticket for a film. If there was a foreign-language feature with subtitles, you chose that, knowing that it would remain relatively deserted no matter what day it was. Failing that, you avoided any picture designed to appeal to the young. Anything animated, anything with children or animals on the poster.

If the featured performers were ones he recognized, the audience was likely to be sparse. Because that meant the actors were older than average, and so were the people who came to see them. Such films were among the more popular on weekday afternoons, when the elderly made up the greater portion of the audience. On weekends, however, when senior rates were not available, the old folks stayed home, and the young watched Brad Pitt or Scooby-Doo.

There were other useful maneuvers. The best seats, from the Carpenter’s point of view, were on either side against the wall, and at the rear of the theater. This did not put you all that far from the screen. In the old days, when screens were much larger and movie houses cavernous, it was a different matter. But you were as far away as you could get, and unless the showing was a sellout (and it wouldn’t be, unless you’d made a gross error in your film selection) there’d be no one sitting near you, neither to the side or immediately in front.

Because screens had gotten smaller along with the theaters, you might not be able to see too well from where you were, and if you’d been lucky enough to find a foreign film, well, you could forget about trying to read the subtitles. But entertainment wasn’t the point. A secure and restful environment, that was your prime consideration.

The tricky part came when the picture ended. You couldn’t just stay in your seat and wait for the next showing, because they’d clear the house and walk through the length of each row, picking up at least some of the popcorn tubs and candy wrappers left behind by the departing moviegoers. You could try saying you’d come in halfway through the picture, he supposed, but he wasn’t at all sure that would work; worse yet, it invited attention, and that was what you most wanted to avoid.

What you had to do was plan. By the time you bought your ticket, you already knew what film you’d go to after you left the first theater. Today, for example, the Carpenter had been one of the first at the box office, one of the first to take a seat — in the rear, of course, and against the right-hand wall — for a showing of a film starring Clint Eastwood. He dozed through the commercials, dozed through the coming attractions, and dozed on and off through the picture, opening his eyes each time gunfire roused him and checking his watch before drifting off again.

When one such check showed only fifteen minutes before the film was scheduled to end, the Carpenter left the theater, having to disturb only one person, a tiny little woman perched on the aisle seat. Anyone who noticed him leave at that point in the film would take him for a man who had to go to the bathroom, and the Carpenter did precisely that. Nor was the visit undertaken purely for purposes of deception; the Carpenter could have held out until the end of the film, but welcomed the opportunity to relieve himself.

Having done so, he went to the refreshment stand and bought popcorn, then headed for the theater that was next on his list, where a film based on a Henry James novel was scheduled to begin in twenty minutes. The timing was right, and he couldn’t imagine that any film based on anything by Henry James could draw a young audience. Carrying his popcorn, mingling with other people with the same destination, the Carpenter did not look like someone sneaking into a second film that he hadn’t paid for. He didn’t see how it could occur to anyone to stop him and demand a look at his ticket stub, and of course no one did.

The commercials and coming attractions were the same ones he’d seen before the first picture, and indeed ones he’d seen repeatedly in recent days. He found them comfortingly familiar. And the feature film, once it started, was wonderfully soothing, with no gunfire to rouse him, or even voices raised in anger. The interruptions had played a useful role during the Eastwood movie, but now the Carpenter was perfectly willing to doze right through to the end. Two films would provide him with all the sleep he needed.

He closed his eyes and settled in to enjoy the show.

Your two worst enemies on a stakeout were your bladder and your brain.

The first was obvious. Sit around for hours on end, and sooner or later you had to take a leak. Even if you were a camel, the time came when you had to go. If you were in a parked car, you brought a jar along, hoping when you used it that nothing happened in midstream, that you didn’t get caught in a firefight with the jar in one hand and your dick in the other. And, since things rarely happened that abruptly, and often didn’t happen at all, you were generally okay.

If you didn’t have a car to sit in, if you were in fact out in public view on a park bench, a jar wouldn’t help. You’d be better off getting on all fours and lifting a leg against a tree, hoping they’d take you for a funny-looking German shepherd. So what you had to do was desert your post, and that was acceptable when you had a partner who could watch twice as hard in your absence. When you were alone, well, it meant that for a while there was no one minding the store.

Your bladder was a problem once every hour or so, or more frequently if you’d been spending too much time at Starbucks. Your brain was dangerous every minute you were out there. Because it could get bored, and it could wander, and the thing you were waiting for could happen right in front of your eyes and you’d miss it because your mind was somewhere else.

It was a funny thing, but detectives weren’t the best choice for a stakeout. Patrolmen tended to be better, especially veterans who had never got a gold shield and never would. It wasn’t that they were stupid, or lacked ambition. What they lacked was imagination.

And imagination was the common denominator of detectives. It wasn’t enough by itself to get you a promotion, good luck and good connections played a bigger role than anyone cared to admit, but still it seemed to be part of the makeup of virtually every detective he’d known.

On stakeout, it was a curse. A sufficiently unimaginative man could stare out a car window at a front door, or crouch in a closed van listening to a wiretap, for hours on end, thinking of nothing but the job he was doing. A man with an imagination would try to do just that, but his mind would jump from one thing to another, going off on tangents, and he’d lose track of what put him there in the first place.

Again, a partner helped. The two of you could talk, and one could bring the other back to the here and now.

Alone, well, it was a problem.

Right now, for instance, he was working hard to stay on top of things. He’d peed not twenty minutes ago, at the men’s room of the café, and had resisted the urge to pick up a small bottle of Evian water at the bar on the way back. And now he was watching the crowd, keeping an eye on the approach to the Boat Basin gates. He looked at another pigeon feeder and wondered why people fed the birds, what it was they got out of it. And he started thinking about pigeons, and how you never saw a young one and rarely saw a dead one, and why was that, anyway? And was it true that kids from the Asian subcontinent, or from Central America, or from Vietnam, trapped pigeons off the street for their parents to cook in their restaurants? And hadn’t they said the same thing a generation or two ago about the Chinese? And wouldn’t they have said much the same about the Irish, but for the fact that no Irish immigrant had ever opened a restaurant, and who would have gone there if he did? And...

He caught himself, forced his mind back to business. It was going to be a long day, he thought. It felt like it had been a long day already.

The Carpenter was watching a newsreel.

They had newsreels all the time when he was a boy. Coming attractions, and then cartoons, and a short, either a travelogue or something funny, and then the feature. Followed, more often than not, by the second feature, itself preceded by more cartoons and coming attractions.

Now you got commercials, and animated exhortations to put your trash in the basket and be quiet during the movie.

Once, he remembered, there had been a newsreel theater near Times Square that showed nothing but newsreels from morning to night, a sort of theatrical version of CNN. Television had put paid to that enterprise, as it had meant the end of newsreels altogether. So the Carpenter couldn’t be watching a newsreel. It had to be a dream.

He was awake enough to reason that out, while sufficiently asleep to remain in the dream and go on watching the dream newsreel. It was in black and white, of course, as newsreels were meant to be, and it included moments the Carpenter had seen in newsreels, or might have seen — the mushroom cloud of an atomic explosion, German soldiers goose-stepping, Allied troops liberating a concentration camp. Then, still in black and white, a plane sailed into the World Trade Center tower, and flame billowed, and the building fell in on itself.

There is an announcer throughout, and the Carpenter can hear the words he speaks but can’t make them out. And then one word leaps out, the word Carpenter, with nothing intelligible before or after it. And there he is on the screen, dressed not as he is today, in dark trousers and a dark nylon sport shirt from the store in Greenpoint, nor in the clothes he has in his backpack, his yachting costume. No, on the screen he is wearing a dark suit, like one of the ones he used to buy at Brooks Brothers, and a striped tie, and he’s surrounded by a crowd, and they’re cheering, they’re all there to honor him.

Savior of the city, he hears the announcer say, and President Eisenhower is there, smiling that huge smile of his, and Mayor Wagner, and John Wayne, and they’re giving him some sort of reward. And now the noise dies down, and he’s supposed to say something.

And can’t think of a thing to say.

That’s unsettling enough to wake him, or seems to be, and he opens his eyes, or thinks he does, and now the screen fills with the image of a stunningly beautiful woman. He thinks at first that she looks familiar, and then that he knows her, and of course it’s Carole, his wife, and she’s looking right at him.

Carole...

I’m right here, Billy.

Why did you leave me, Carole?

I told you I could only stay for a minute. Didn’t I tell you that?

The first time, Carole. When you took the pills. Why did you do that?

Oh, Billy.

You should have told me.

You would have made me stay.

No, I’d have come with you. I tried to follow you, but then I woke up. It wasn’t my time.

No, Billy.

I had things I had to do.

I know you did.

But I’ll be along soon, Carole. I can’t do much more. I get so tired.

I know you do.

Are you going again, Carole? Don’t go.

I have to, my darling.

Carole? I’ll be with you soon, Carole.

His eyes were open. Had they been open all along? And his cheeks were wet. Did anyone notice him weeping? No, there was no one near. No one noticed a thing.

And the movie was back, the Henry James movie, with women in gowns and everyone looking sensitive and aristocratic. And an audience, even on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, that filled fewer than half the seats.

There were two people between him and the aisle. They rose to let him past, sat down once he was by them. Their eyes never left the screen.

The men’s room, the stairs, the sidewalk outside. He’d walk home, get something to eat along the way. He knew he ought to eat, although he wasn’t very hungry. He hadn’t touched his popcorn.

One trick, Fran Buckram thought, was to move around a little. If you sat in the same spot forever, your eyes on the same scene, it got harder and harder to pay attention to what was in front of your eyes. If you got up and walked around you got the blood moving, and when you sat down again on a different bench you saw things from a different angle.

It helped, but what would help even more was to have something to do.

A book or a newspaper would be handy. And what could look more natural than a man reading? Always the chance, though, that he’d get caught up in his reading and miss the man he was waiting for. Of course that wouldn’t happen if he had something he couldn’t read, and he found himself wondering about that Asian man he’d seen earlier with his Spanish newspaper. Was he on a stakeout of his own?

He got out his cell phone, tried to think of somebody to call. Arlene? No, he really didn’t have anything to say to her. Susan? Yeah, right. She’d tell him to take off all his clothes and handcuff himself to the bench. Then take two enemas and call her in the morning.

He called his own number, thinking he’d check his messages, then heard his own outgoing message, the one that told people not to leave messages, and saw the futility of that. And what an arrogant message he’d recorded — I’m too busy for you, so don’t leave me a message, but try me again later when I might have time for you. Nice, very nice.

Even if he had a paper it was getting too dark to read. Good, he thought. Pretty soon it would be dark enough and the human traffic sparse enough to think about boarding the Nancy Dee. First, though, he’d better get something to eat. He’d pee while he was at it, but peeing wouldn’t be that much of a problem once he was on the boat. There was bound to be a toilet, which you were probably supposed to call something else. The head? That sounded right. So he could go to the head, or pee in a wastebasket (and God knew what they’d call that) or a bottle. Or in the corner, because it wasn’t his boat, and the man whose boat it was would never know the difference.

The Carpenter had walked all the way back from the theater, a distance of about two miles. He’d taken his time, stopping to buy a sandwich, eating it as he walked, stopping again for a can of soda. The sun was down by the time he reached Riverside Park, but the day was still bright, and the sky over Jersey was stained red and purple.

It was a wonderful city for sunsets. You couldn’t see them from his old apartment, and that was the one thing he would have changed about the place. It did something for a person to see a beautiful sunset.

He walked through the park, walked a hundred yards or so past the Boat Basin, sat for a few minutes, then walked back the way he’d come. Looking at the people, paying attention to what he saw.

Something felt wrong.

He’d felt glimmerings of it on the way back from the movie house. He thought about the date he’d circled on his calendar. Well, he’d made the circle on paper with a felt-tipped pen. He hadn’t carved it in stone. Who was to say he couldn’t move it up?

A year, of course, was the conventional period of mourning. Making the final sacrifice a year to the day after their magnificent sacrifice had a certain poetic value, not to mention a mathematical precision. But how trivial such considerations seemed to him now.

The sooner he carried out his mission, the sooner he could rest. And he was tired, so tired, in a way far beyond what sleep could cure. His spirit ached with the tiredness he felt.

He could rest. And he could see Carole again, and his children. And all the other poor sweet innocent sacrificed angels. That gentle fellow with the shaved head. Buddha, he was called. And that poor woman in Brooklyn, and the prostitute, Clara.

Oh, so many of them.

Yes, he’d made up his mind. He’d decided. He wouldn’t wait any longer.

But first there was the sensation he felt, the awareness that centered at the back of his neck, that atavistic animal sense of being sought, of being hunted. And hadn’t he been told just yesterday that someone had come to his boat, someone had been looking for him?

He studied the people in the area. There were two men who seemed to him to be without apparent purpose, but who nevertheless had a purposeful air about them. As if they might be watching and waiting for someone.

One got up and left, and the Carpenter watched until he was sure he hadn’t merely changed seats. Then he turned his attention to the other, not looking directly at him but observing him out of the corner of his eye. The Carpenter was in shadows, where he couldn’t be seen easily, and he had the knack of disappearing, of attracting no attention. This man did not have that knack. He was, in fact, quite the opposite. There was something magnetic about him. He drew the eye.

The Carpenter let his eye be drawn, kept it on the man. He looked familiar, the Carpenter thought. His face was one he’d seen before, perhaps in the newspapers or on television.

Not in a newsreel, though. He wasn’t old enough to have been in a newsreel.

And now he was on his feet, headed south on the bike path, walking by the water’s edge. And he paused at the very gate that led to the Nancy Dee, but no, he wasn’t entering, he was just taking a good look.

The Carpenter smiled.

The man turned, and the Carpenter watched him make his way to the path that would take him to the Boat Basin Café. The Carpenter smiled again, and made his own way carefully and unobtrusively to the slip where the Nancy Dee lay waiting for him.

He’d have liked to paint out the name. Call it the Carole.

Inside the cabin, he left the light unlit. When his eyes accustomed themselves to the darkness he went over to the chest of drawers and took the gun from its clip, slipped it into his pocket. Then he sought out the cabin’s darkest corner and wedged himself into it, standing there like a statue in a niche. If no one came, he’d remain still and motionless for two, three, four hours, waiting in patient silence until it was time for his sacrifice.

If anyone showed up before then, well, he was ready.

Ten-thirty, and still no sign of the son of a bitch.

Which was fine, actually. This way he could be on board when the Carpenter showed up. It was late enough now for him to make his move. If Blackbeard gave him any grief, he’d drag him around the corner and cuff him to a lamppost.

No point sneaking or skulking. That would draw attention quicker than anything else. No, the thing to do was walk right out on the pier and hop on board that boat as if you owned it, and that’s just what he did. He had the urge to go over to the helm, grab ahold of the wheel, and gaze off into the distance like an old sea dog.

But he’d be wasting time. He walked over to the locked hatchway, drew out his key ring, went to work.

The Carpenter’s mind was adrift, bobbing in a sea of thought. But he came to suddenly, sensing a presence. Moments later he heard footsteps on the pier, and then felt the boat tilt as someone came aboard.

He hadn’t moved since he took his position in the corner of the cabin, not even when his mind was all drifty. Nor did he move now.

He heard someone trying a key in the lock. But who would have a key? He wondered if he should have left the hatch ajar. He’d thought of it, decided it might look suspicious. But if the fellow couldn’t get in—

If he couldn’t get in, well, he’d just go away. Which would actually simplify things.

Even so, the Carpenter hoped he’d be able to open the door. And he listened as whatever the man was using scraped the metal, scraped it again, then caught and forced it free. The hatch came open, letting a little light into the cabin, but none that reached the corner where the Carpenter was waiting.

He didn’t move, didn’t breathe. Until the man came in, and found the stacked cases of empty beer bottles, the cans of gasoline, the heaped strips of cloth. The man stiffened, and the Carpenter sensed he could tell what he was looking at. The man lifted one of the bottles from the top case, then put it back where he’d found it.

The Carpenter drew his pistol, took one step forward, pointed the gun at the back of the intruder’s neck. And squeezed the trigger.

Instead of a bang! he heard a dry click! The gun was broken, or improperly loaded. But not entirely useless. Even as the man started to spin around, the Carpenter drew the gun back and used it like a hammer, like a tire iron, swung it with all his strength against the back of the man’s head.

He fell to his knees, tried to brace himself, tried to rise, tried to turn.

The Carpenter hit him again, and this time he fell all the way and lay still.