When the Thrill Is Gone

35

Somewhere between Trey’s and bed I called Zephyra, asking her to reserve a first-class seat for me on the earliest morning Acela train down to Baltimore. I left a text with Mardi to look up real estate sales in and around the Maryland city for transactions by Chrystal Chambers for a year or so after the time of her first successes as a painter.

The talk with Aura, in spite of the bottle of wine, had left me quite sober. She saw my life the way it was and loved me accordingly. Who and what I was, was what she loved and, at the same time, too much for her heart to bear.

This thought trailed after me on the early-morning taxi ride to the train station, down the long concrete platform to the first-class car. It settled with me into the single seat on the right side of the upscale cabin.

“First class, sir?” a not so young white woman asked. She had pink-and-dirty-blond hair and the hint of an elaborate tattoo just above the line of her uniform collar.

“Yeah.” I handed her the machine-generated ticket I got upon entering Penn Station.

She handed me a menu. I waved it away.

“Ate a bagel in the station,” I explained.

She shrugged and moved on to the seat behind me.

“Good morning,” she said with a note of recognition in her voice.

“Good morning,” an elderly, male, German-accented voice replied.

I knew that voice — only the voice, not the man who spoke, not personally at any rate. It was the voice of a celebrity, someone I knew about from the media.

Who was it?

“You’re going down to meet the president?” she asked.

“Just a dinner,” he said. “How are your children?”

Tickled, she replied, “Wonderful.”

“Doing well in school?”

“The girl, Rebecca, is. Felix just wants to rip and run.”

“It takes longer for boys to settle in,” he said.

“I hope so.”

Another man entered the car. The way he walked said that he worked for Amtrak but he wasn’t an engineer or porter. Older, near about sixty, with a certain recognizable strain in eyes that looked out for trouble, he gauged me and then proceeded to the voice I recognized but had not yet identified.

“Good morning, sir,” the train security man said.

“Mr. Landsdale,” the voice greeted.

“Everybody treating you okay?”

“Marvelously.”

“I hope you can go down there and kick some butt, sir,” the slender, gray-haired troubleshooter said. “They want to turn this country into Russia down there.”

The celebrity laughed softly and said, “The wheel is always turning, Mr. Landsdale. Wait long enough and you always come back to the place you started from.”

“I hope so,” Landsdale said, though I wasn’t sure he understood the symbolism.

While they spoke, a dozen or so first-class passengers boarded. Men and women in business attire with cell phones and briefcases, laptops and personal DVD players.

I stood up to put William Williams’ satchel in the storage area above my seat. Glancing to my right, I saw that my neighbor was none other than Rainier Klaus, called by some the Architect of Death in Southeast Asia, in a war either forgotten or misunderstood by anyone under forty in contemporary America.

Mr. Landsdale looked at me and I returned to my seat, wondering again — wandering in a mind littered with details aglow with ancient passions, like long-dead stars glittering in a moonless night.

My father used to lecture me about Mr. Klaus. He worked in the State Department. There he planned the decimation of nations judged to be the enemies of democracy’s master — corporate America. It was he who initiated the carpet bombing and legal torture. He was said to have such a good memory that he never wrote anything down and so neither he nor his bosses were ever held accountable for their crimes.

His assassin can use the legal stand of self-defense, my father used to say.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths were on this man’s head and he was going down to advise our new liberal president.

I was armed and fast. My father, in his unmarked grave somewhere south of Mexico and north of Antarctica, was hoping for an impromptu assassination. But I was no judge, much less an executioner. The wheel that Klaus talked about did its orbit, and all I could do, all he could, was to hold on.

I had to do something so I stood again and took down a few of William Williams’ texts on politics and philosophy. Almost every word was highlighted in either pink, yellow, or blue. Many phrases were underlined and there were cryptic notes throughout.

The unconscious is not known but ignorance gets no hearing in the court of Fate, he wrote in Lacan’s The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. In Lear he wrote, Yes, the stink, this odor is how you can tell what festers in the hearts of bricklayers, seamstresses, and convicts.

Much of what he expressed was so idiosyncratic as to make its meaning indecipherable. The language was fevered, maybe not quite rational. But there was also banal information. Shopping lists, special dates (like Corinthia’s birthday), and more sinister info like the shadowing of a man from one part of the city to another.

I followed him again today, Mr. Williams wrote on a flyleaf at the back of The Gift of Death. He kissed his wife goodbye and then went to see his lover. They dallied on a park bench while the children of the people he destroyed wallowed in fear. I had a pistol in my pocket and sweat in the palms of my hands. But that man was long dead, we both were. Now we were ghosts and no action would change that.

“I see you’re reading Kapital by Marx,” a voice said. “Are you a Communist?”

I turned to see Rainier Klaus standing next to my seat. The train was moving. He was probably headed for the john. I hadn’t even noticed us leaving the station. There was a swamp outside the window. A solitary heron, standing on one leg, stood sentry over the muck.

“Not reading exactly,” I said, patting the unopened tome sitting on my tray.

“No? What, then?”

“I’m a private detective and these are the books of a man who went missing a few decades ago. I’ve been retained to find him, and these books are the only testament.”

I think it was my last word that really got the diplomat’s attention.

“Maybe he doesn’t want to be found,” Klaus suggested.

“Since when did what we want change the acts of others?” I asked.

He smiled, shrugged, and said, “I cannot argue.”

A burly-looking man at the end of the train was watching me closely.

“Tell me something, Mr. Klaus.”

“Yes?”

“Do you ever feel guilty?”

He looked down into my eyes and took at least fifteen seconds to consider my question. Finally he said, “Every year I go to the countryside of northern Vietnam. There I visit the towns and provinces with a group of doctors to bring aid to those who need it. My wife used to come with me. Now my sons come along.

“But, to answer your question — no, I do not feel guilt. That would be an insult to my enemies.”

Klaus moved on, and I was reminded of my conversation with Hush. Killers lived and died in their own ether.

I opened the cover of Williams’ copy of Kapital; a folded-up and yellowed scrap of old newspaper lay there. It was a torn section of the real estate page of a Hoboken newspaper with an ad for an apartment circled.

I scribbled down the phone number on one of my falseidentity business cards and tucked it neatly away in the breast pocket of my blue jacket.