Trust Your Eyes

SIXTY

After pulling off the moving blankets and dragging me from the van, Nicole or Lewis tore off the tape that was binding my legs. But the ski mask stayed on. They led me through a door and guided me no more than half a dozen feet down what I supposed was a short hallway. My shoulder brushed up against a wall at one point, and wooden boards creaked below my feet. Hands from behind held both my shoulders, as though guiding me through a doorway.

Then the hands stopped me, and turned me 180 degrees.

“Sit,” Lewis said, working my bound arms over the back of what felt like a standard wooden chair, then shoving me down into it. Then he ran a couple loops of duct tape about my waist, securing me to the chair. He didn’t tape my ankles to the legs, so I moved them around in small circles, getting my blood circulating wherever I could. Suddenly, someone grabbed a fistful of ski mask at the top of my head and yanked, grabbing some of my hair in the process.

I blinked several times as my eyes adjusted to the light, although there wasn’t all that much of it. Lewis was standing directly in front of me, then moved out of the way as Nicole brought Thomas into the room. He was pushed down onto a second chair a couple of feet away from me, taped in, and then Nicole pulled his ski mask off. He blinked a couple of times, as I had, then exchanged a frightened glance with me.

“I’ll get the computer,” Lewis said. “And let Howard know we’re here.”

We were in a windowless room, about twelve by twelve, that had the feel of being the back of a shop. In one corner was a heavy, antique rolltop desk, the sliding door in the up position to allow for a computer. The various cubbyholes were jammed with paperwork, what looked like bills, receipts, newspaper clippings. The walls were almost entirely covered in shelves, made from the same kind of planks that made up the worn, wood floor. The shelves were crammed with old, musty books, antique clocks, Royal Doulton figurines, old-fashioned cameras with bellows that could be stretched out, accordion-style. But most of all, there were toys. Decades-old tinplate cars and trucks, the paint worn off by children who were very likely dead now. Pewter toy soldiers. Dinky Toys, like the ones I had when I was a kid. I spotted an Esso tanker truck my father had given me around the time I was three. An assortment of Batmobile models, in metal and plastic and in various scales. A set of lawn darts and hoops, like we once had and played with in the backyard until Thomas nearly speared the neighbor’s dog. A child-sized plastic fireman’s helmet in red with the word “Texaco” emblazoned across the front. Cardboard boxes of old board games based on long since canceled television shows, like Columbo, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Brady Bunch, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. And, of course, countless dolls. Barbies, Raggedy Anns, Cabbage Patch Kids, and life-sized plastic babies whose eyes would shut when you laid them flat. Some were minus limbs; others, heads. One shelf contained a collection of old metal robots; another a pile of tinplate trains that looked as though they’d been in a catastrophic wreck. Three black balls, each about the size of a squash ball, which I recognized as sixties-era Wham-O Super Balls, the kind that could bounce over a house.

But I didn’t feel nostalgic, looking at these treasures from yesterday. What I felt was scared. Scared shitless.

Lewis returned with the computer tower and set it on the desk. He detached various cables from the computer that was there, then attached them to Thomas’s.

Nicole, expressionless, addressed Thomas and me. “Someone’s going to be asking you some questions, so the tape’s coming off. If either one of you starts yelling, I hurt the other one. Fast and hard. Are we clear?”

We both nodded. Nicole ripped the tape off me with one short, cruel, backhanded stroke. I winced, licked my lips, and tasted blood. When she did it to Thomas, he yelped. “That hurt!” he said, like he’d been kicked in the schoolyard. But then he immediately apologized to Nicole. “Sorry. I’ll be quiet. Don’t hurt Ray.”

I said to him, “You okay?”

He shook his head. “No. My arms hurt, my lips hurt, and I can’t feel my hands.”

I couldn’t feel mine, either. The plastic cuffs had cut off most of the circulation. I appealed to Nicole. “My brother’s hands, they’re probably turning blue. Mine, too. Can you help us out here?”

Lewis went into his backpack for a pair of orange-handled snippers. “Don’t do anything stupid,” he said as he cut my cuffs, then secured my wrists to the chair with duct tape. The blood rushed back into my fingers, and I closed and opened my hands a dozen times to get the tingling out of them. Lewis did the same thing for Thomas, then went back to work on the computer tower, hooking up the last of the cables and pressing the start button. The machine began to whir and the monitor he’d commandeered started lighting up.

Thomas said, “Anything that’s on there is confidential.”

The home screen, powder blue with only a couple of icons on it, cast a soft light across the room. There was one to open up an Internet browser, one for mail, one down in the corner for trash.

Lewis went on the Net and checked the computer’s Internet history. Thomas hadn’t had an opportunity to clear it, as was his custom at the end of the day, but there wasn’t much to look at. Just plenty of locations from Whirl360.

Lewis said, “Don’t you ever look at porn or anything?”

Thomas didn’t appear to understand whether this was a serious question. He said, “I don’t have time.”

Lewis was clicking from image to image, city to city. All the different places Thomas had been exploring today-well, yesterday now. It had to be after midnight. “Why do you-no, I’ll let Howard ask you. No sense going over it twice.”

He got out of Whirl360 and opened up the mail program.

Thomas said to me, “He shouldn’t be reading those.” Then he started in with questions. “What city are we in? What street are we on? What’s the address?”

I’d been wondering the same thing, although maybe not with the same level of detail. We’d been driving long enough to be in New York or Boston or Buffalo and probably half a dozen other urban centers. We could be in Philadelphia, for all I knew.

Nicole ignored him, as did Lewis.

Thomas looked at me. “I want to go home.”

“I know. I know. Just try to hang in.”

Lewis was opening one e-mail after another, shaking his head slowly, no doubt trying to puzzle out what the hell Thomas was up to with all his updates to the CIA.

“What the fuck…”

He continued to read updates while Nicole looked around the room. She’d pull out a book, check the cover, put it back. She took a doll off the shelf and examined it like it was a souvenir from another planet. “My mother didn’t let me play with dolls,” she said to no one in particular.

Everyone looked up when we heard a knock. It came from a different direction than the way we’d come in. We’d entered this room, it seemed to me, from a side door, but the knock sounded as though it was coming from the front. Lewis left the computer, pulled aside a green curtain that served as a door between this room and the front of the shop. As light spilled into the front room I could make out more, and more orderly, displays of antique toys.

“It’s him,” Lewis said to no one in particular as he slipped out of the room.

Who was him? It had been mentioned more than once that someone wanted to talk to us. Someone Lewis and Nicole reported to.

I was no less scared than I’d been since we left the house, but I was also curious. When you’re pretty sure you’re going to end up dead, wondering who you’ll meet next provides some distraction.

I heard a small bell jingle as Lewis opened a door. There was some muffled conversation, then two sets of footsteps working their way to the back of the store. I heard a man ask Lewis, “What is this place?”

Lewis said, “One of the guys who helped me move Bridget’s body owns it. He’s a toy nut.”

Bridget?

Then Lewis appeared, holding back the curtain to allow a stout, short, balding man in his fifties to come in. He was wearing a topcoat that looked like it was made of camel hair or cashmere, and an expensive suit under that.

He ran his eyes over Thomas and me. It struck me that he looked more dumbfounded than menacing.

“So, these are our guys,” he said to Lewis.

“Yup,” he said.

Then the man’s eyes landed on Nicole. She’d put away the doll and was leaning against one of the shelves stuffed with books, her arms crossed over her breasts.

“You,” he said contemptuously. “You’re the one who fucked this up.”

“Nice to meet you at last, too, Howard,” she said, meeting his gaze, staring him down.

Thomas and I gave Howard an excuse to break eye contact with her. He said to me, “Which one are you?”

“Ray Kilbride. That’s Thomas. My brother.”

Thomas said, “Tell that man-Lewis-tell him to leave my computer alone.”

Howard turned to Lewis and said, “You have it hooked up?”

“Yeah. There’s some weird shit on here. All these e-mails.”

Howard reached into his jacket for a slender case, from which he extracted a pair of reading glasses. “Open a few.”

Lewis did some clicking. Howard read quickly through the e-mails. “Are they all like this?”

“Yup.”

“All addressed to Bill Clinton, care of the CIA?”

“Yeah.”

Howard looked at us, then back at Lewis. “Tell me about the phone call again.”

“Someone called the house, asked for that one, said it was Bill Clinton. Like I said.”

“But you also said it didn’t sound like him.”

Lewis shrugged. “I mean, I’ve never talked to the man, but no, I don’t think it sounded like him.”

“People sound different on the phone,” Thomas said.

Howard was still looking at the screen. “These e-mails, they’re all in the sent file?”

“That’s right,” Lewis said.

“What about in the in-box, or the deleted messages. Are there actually any messages from Bill Clinton or anyone at the CIA?”

Lewis did some clicking. “Nothing.”

Howard said, “Hmm.” He went back through the curtain and returned with another chair. He sat it in front of Thomas and me. He looked first at me.

“Ray, I have a number of questions I need straight answers to. I suppose you understand what will happen if you don’t provide them.”

“I have a pretty good idea,” I said.

He nodded slowly, like we were on the same wavelength. “We’ll get back to the Clinton thing. But it makes sense to start from the beginning. Who do you work for?”

“I’m self-employed. I’m an illustrator. I work freelance.”

“I see. You don’t do any freelance work that’s not related to illustration?”

“No.”

“And how about you?” he asked Thomas. “For whom do you work?”

“I’m sort of self-employed, too,” he said. “But I work for the CIA.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “Thomas-”

Howard held up a hand to shush me. “Thomas, tell me what you do for the CIA.”

“I shouldn’t be telling you,” he said. “It’s black ops.”

Howard’s eyebrows shot up. “Black ops?”

“That’s what President Clinton said. But that’s just part of it.”

“If you don’t tell me, Thomas, I’m going to have them start by breaking one of your brother’s fingers.”

“Don’t hurt him,” Thomas said. But I could see him struggling with whether to sacrifice me to protect the mission.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Tell them. I’m not saying this because I don’t want them to hurt me, Thomas.” I decided to play into his worldview. “I would imagine they already know most of it, anyway.”

He nodded slowly. I wasn’t sure whether he actually believed me, or was relieved to have found a way to tell Howard what he wanted to know without feeling too guilty about it.

“Well,” Thomas said, “I’m helping them for when all the online maps disappear, because that’s going to happen sooner or later, and also I’m going to be on call, if there’s an agent in trouble. Like, if he’s on the run in Mumbai or something and doesn’t know which way to go, he’ll call me and I can tell him.” He said this all very matter-of-factly, like a kid discussing his paper route.

“Explain that a little more,” Howard said.

“Which part?”

“Any of it.”

“I memorize maps. I memorize cities. I memorize the streets. So when all the maps disappear, I can help.”

Lewis said, “The computer history’s all Whirl360.”

“You memorize streets on Whirl360?” Howard asked.

Thomas nodded. “That’s right.”

Howard smiled and tapped his own head with an index finger. “And you keep it all up here?”

Again: “That’s right.”

“So how does this work? If I give you an address, you can describe it for me?”

Thomas nodded.

Howard gave him a skeptical look. “Okay,” he said, playing along. “My mother lives on Atlantic Avenue, in Boston. She has an apartment there.”

Thomas closed his eyes. “Near Beach Street? That’s nice along there. Is she in that building with the real estate office on the first floor? All the sidewalks there are made of red brick. They look really nice.” He opened his eyes.

Howard appeared slightly unnerved. He looked my way and I said, “He’s never been to Boston.”

“Okay, I got one,” Lewis said. “The twenty-seven-hundred block of California Street in Denver. Between Twenty-seventh and Twenty-eighth.” He said to Howard, “I grew up there.”

Thomas closed his eyes again. “Was it in one of the one-story blue houses, or the six-story apartment building across the street with the walls that are kind of white, then go to brick color, then back to white, and-”

“Jesus Christ,” Lewis said. “It’s like he’s got a fucking computer in his head.”

Howard said, “Which was it, Lewis? One of the little blue houses, or the apartment?”

“The apartment,” he said quietly.

Howard took a very long breath, laced his fingers together, and rested his forearms on his thighs. “How many cities are you memorizing, Thomas?”

“All of them,” he said.

Howard’s head retreated a little in surprise. “All of them in the United States?”

“In the world,” Thomas said. “I’m not done. The world’s very big. If you asked me about, say, Gomez Palacio, in Mexico, I haven’t gotten there yet. There’s probably more places I haven’t gotten to than I have gotten to, like smaller cities and towns, because I’m trying to finish the big cities first.”

“Okay,” Howard said, glancing over at Nicole, who hadn’t moved a muscle since he’d last spoken to her. “So, Thomas, let’s say we’ve established that you really do have some kind of gift. I have to admit, I am impressed.”

“Thank you,” Thomas said. Despite our current situation, the praise pleased him.

“So this is what you do, you memorize these streets,” Howard said, a statement, not a question. “And what are all those e-mails about?”

“Updates,” Thomas said, with a tone that suggested that was a pretty dumb question. Like, What the hell else would they be?

“Updates on?”

“On how the project is going. When I memorize new cities, or parts of them, I let the president know.”

“And what’s this other thing you mentioned, about all the online maps disappearing?”

Thomas gave Howard a wary look. “I bet you know all about that.”

“Well, if I do, then it won’t hurt if you tell me.”

“There’s going to be some kind of catastrophic event that destroys all the online maps. A virus or something. Maybe caused by some enemy of the United States. This will happen after everyone’s gotten rid of their paper maps, because we all rely on the computer now. It’s kind of like photos. Everyone used to have their pictures developed on paper, but now they post them online. When everything crashes, everyone will lose all their photos. It’ll be like that with maps.”

Now Howard looked at me. “Is he for real?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Does this freakish ability of his have something to do with why you showed up at Allison Fitch’s apartment on Orchard Street?”

I nodded. “Thomas was memorizing that street, and he saw the woman in the window. With the bag over her head.” My mouth was dry, and I licked my lips. “He wanted me to check it out.”

“How did he know to look for it?”

“He didn’t. He just found it.”

“No,” Howard said. “I don’t believe that. The odds of that, they’re a billion to one.”

“No,” Thomas said. “The odds are that eventually I will see everything.”

Howard turned to Lewis. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know. Seems kind of unlikely to me. Maybe someone asked him to look for it.”

“Is that what happened, Thomas? Someone asked you to look for it?”

“No,” he said. “Nobody did.”

“Not even Bill Clinton?” Howard followed the question with a nervous laugh.

“No, I just send him the progress reports. He’s my liaison with the agency.”

“But he never e-mails you back. There aren’t any e-mails in your in-box, or in the trash.”

“He communicates with me, but not through e-mail.”

“Communicates how?”

“He talks to me. Lately, he’s been using the phone.”

“What, his voice just comes to you?”

Thomas nodded.

I’d been so preoccupied with everything that had happened to Thomas and me the last few hours, I hadn’t had much time to think about that phone call. I still had no idea what it meant, and was wondering whether I had to understand it to somehow use it to my advantage. This bunch was clearly in the dark as much as I was.

Howard gave his head a shake and said to Lewis, “There’s no goddamn way this freak has chats with a former president.”

“I agree,” Lewis said. “Can’t be.”

“Thomas,” Howard continued, “do you see a doctor? A psychiatrist?”

“Yes. Dr. Grigorin.”

“And does he have you on medication?”

“It’s a she,” Thomas said. “Yes. It makes the voices go away. For the most part. But I can still hear the president sometimes.”

“With a phone, and without a phone,” Howard said.

“The phone’s clearer,” Thomas said.

“No way,” Howard said again. “There’s just no way.”

“You’re right,” I said tentatively, making Howard turn and look at me. “It makes no sense that a former president of the United States would be phoning someone like Thomas and using him for the CIA. It’s ridiculous. You’re absolutely right.”

Howard could tell I was going someplace with this, so he waited.

“I mean, you’ve seen what Thomas can do. He has an extraordinary talent. But at the same time, his view of reality is sometimes at odds with what the rest of us believe. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was much younger.”

Thomas gave me a disdainful look that said, That doesn’t mean I’m not right.

I continued, “I mean, this whole thing about all the maps disappearing, and black ops. It’s kind of over the top. But let’s say you have someone with a tremendous gift, but who also tends to believe in grandiose conspiracies, who believes that very powerful people are interested in what he has to offer. Do you call him up and say, ‘Hi, this is Joe Blow. I wonder if you could do a little snooping around for me?’ Or do you call him up and say, ‘Hi, I used to be president of the United States, and I need your help.’”

Howard studied me for several seconds. “What are you saying?”

“Okay, I’m gonna come clean here. I’m saying that my brother’s not doing work for the CIA, or the FBI, or Bill Clinton, or Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But he is, unknowingly,” and at this point I looked apologetically at Thomas, “helping Carlo Vachon.”

“Who?” Thomas asked.

“Vachon?” Lewis said. “The mob guy?”

Even Nicole, who had been doing her best to look disinterested in the proceedings, perked up at that.

“A mob guy?” Thomas said.

“And,” I continued, “they value Thomas so much, and keep such close tabs on him, there’s a very good chance his people are watching this place right now.”