City Of Lies (42 page)

Freiberg smiled – all high, wide and handsome. ‘You know what they say sweetheart?’ he joked. ‘You want to find out if they love you, well you let ’em go and see if they come back.’

Neumann smiled. He had a gold tooth three back on the right. It caught the light at an angle.

Ben Marcus leaned forward and steepled his fingers together. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘I need a reason?’

Neumann smiled again. ‘No Ben, you don’t need a reason. Noone needs a reason for anything. I’m just curious, that’s all.’

‘Because she made a fool out of me,’ Marcus replied. ‘She was here and then she went with Bernstein, and she made a fool out of me.’

Sol Neumann shook his head and frowned. ‘I don’t get it. Best as I recall it was a straight deal. He wound up with the girl, fair and square, right?’

Marcus shook his head. ‘You’re missing the point Sol. It wasn’t that I lost. It wasn’t that she was the deal and she went with Lenny Bernstein. It was that she didn’t say a word, not one word of complaint. The fact that she said nothing made it clear that she wanted to go more than she wanted to stay with me. That’s why, Sol . . . as simple as that.’

‘So when? Before or after?’

‘After. The whole thing goes down and then you get her.’

‘You want me to do it personally?’

‘Whatever you like, Sol. You do it yourself or you have someone do it. All I want to know at the end of the day is that Cathy Hollander is dead, okay?’

‘Okay,’ Sol Neumann said, a little taken aback by the force of Marcus’s dislike for the girl. ‘Whatever you want, Ben, consider it done.’

Marcus nodded. ‘Good enough,’ he said quietly, and went back to reading his newspaper.

*

Sometimes he takes out photographs. There are a few, perhaps four or five, and though she smiles, though she is laughing, none of them capture the spirit that was Lauren Sachs. Unbeknownst to Duchaunak she bears an uncanny resemblance to Anne Sawyer. Had he known this he perhaps would have believed that God was no crueller than when inflicting irony.

And when he holds the photographs he can see his hands shaking, and it is not the tremens of a drunk, nor the anxieties of a neurotic; it is the suppressed emotional reaction of a man afraid, a man both lonely and afraid.

This is a life, kind of. This is an existence, to apply the broadest sense of understanding to the term. This is what he is, and what he is seems altogether driven by something external. A planet in orbit that remains merely because of a star’s magnetic influence. Were the star to implode, or burn, or even shift its axis, the planet would spiral away into darkness and vanish. As if it had never been. As if it had been a figment of the imagination.

As far as Captain McLuhan was concerned there was no life. It ceased from the moment Duchaunak was suspended, and would resume when he was reinstated.
If
he was.

Duchaunak sets the pictures down on the kitchen counter. He touches each in turn. Five of them. In only one is he present, and at the moment of the taking, as the finger of the photographer was depressed to capture that split second, Lauren had turned her eyes fractionally to the right and smiled. As if at someone else.

There had been no-one else there but Duchaunak. He alone knew that. But now, now and forever, it seems that she is almost ignorant of his presence.

It breaks his heart.

It breaks his fucking heart.

Later, a vague collection of random and empty minutes, he gathers up the pictures and returns them to a worn and tired envelope.

He folds the envelope along all-too-familiar creases, creases that will soon come apart, but he will not throw the envelope away, for there in the right-hand corner as he turns it over, inscribed in her nonchalant hand, it says ‘Me and Frank, Summer ’96’.

Me and Frank.

Me
and
Frank.

His eyes swell with tears.

Fuck it
, he whispers to himself, and those words, almost inaudible, come back at him in echo.

Fuck it
.

The Gordian knot unravelled.

Tie undone, hanging loose from his collar, his eyes bloodshot. Like the ghost of some Atlantic City poker player still haunting the tables, a player found dead in his chair, his heart collapsed from the pressure, his liver like a small, polished stone.

Feels like someone has gathered up every part of his life and then set them on fire, and he – in his desperation to extinguish the flames – has stamped everything to pieces.

The damage is broad, indiscriminate, irreversible. The damage, whichever way he looks at it, is done.

John Harper shed his jacket, let it drop to the floor. Walked like an automaton to the chair under the window and collapsed into it. He felt the chill breeze from the inched-open window beside him but lacked the motivation or will to lean out and close it.

Stayed there for a good thirty minutes, and then moved slightly to ease the pressure in the small of his back. Leaned his head to one side, closed his eyes, tried to imagine himself aboard the
Mary McGregor
, the breeze cutting out of Joe Bay or Blackwater Sound, tried to recall the Dry Tortugas, the footprints of turtles, the reefs, the clear water, the citrus, the coconut . . .

Remembered nothing but the tense claustrophobia of Evelyn’s kitchen on Carmine Street; how the sound of her breathing had changed as she spoke of her sister, Harper’s mother, the mother who never died of pneumonia, the mother who styled herself after Marilyn and took the shortest road away from the longest disappointment . . .

Harper made a sound. It was nothing more than a breathless sense of anguish rising from his chest, but in the solitude of that room on the tenth floor of the American Regent it was not a human sound. It scared him.

He opened his eyes. A sudden surge of energy filled his body and he rose awkwardly from the chair. He paced back and forth for a handful of seconds, then made his way urgently to the
bathroom. No sooner had he flung open the door than the rush of nausea almost doubled him over. He made it to the sink before he heaved with such force that he felt something tear in his trachea. Nothing came but intense pain; the pain of emptiness, of nervous hysteria, of a man teetering on the brink of something altogether deeper than his own capacity to understand.

He believed, as he kneeled there on the floor – head down, hands gripping the edge of the sink above him – that every emotion and feeling, every fear and doubt, every hope and broken promise that he’d heard and experienced in the previous days, had finally located him.

John Harper, he of the wasted life, he of the futile gestures towards nothing of significance, had finally been discovered. This was a judgement for his life. This was the penalty for his laxity and procrastination. There was a lesson to be learned here: that life moved whether you moved with it or not. This other life, a life he’d been unaware of, had grown without him, become something that owned him, despite his absence. He was paying the price for his own shallow ignorance.

For thirty-something years the truth had been here. He had never asked. He had not wished to know. Had he been so blind as to think that it would never find him? If nothing else, Garrett’s suicide should have raised sufficient questions for him to . . .

To what? To interrogate Evelyn further? To insist the police reopen the inquest into his death?

Harper let go of the sink and sat down on his haunches. He did not know what to think. He did not
want
to think.

He closed his eyes tight, and for a time there was just silence and darkness. He prayed it would stay that way, at least for a while.

Dry heaving now. Duchaunak leans back and opens his mouth as if to scream, but nothing comes out. Not a sound.

Heart like a trip-hammer.
Ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk
. Head hurts. Hard to focus. Needs a drink but doesn’t dare. Long, lonely, interminable road; nothing at the end; nothing but further longing and loneliness.

He grips the cool edge of the bathroom sink. Grips it hard.
Leans his full weight back and feels the thing straining at the wall. Stays like that for some time, a minute, perhaps more, and then he stands straight, looks at his reflection, wonders what it would be like to put a gun in his mouth and blow the back of his head off.

Like someone did to Garrett Sawyer at 66 Carmine.

Duchaunak turns on the cold faucet, cups his hands beneath and sluices water onto his face. His eyes sting. He keeps them closed until the sensation subsides.

He wonders what will happen. Wonders if McLuhan will call. Wonders if they’ll leave him out here on his own, forget his name, and someday he’ll be part of that great history of New York deaths: three weeks and the neighbors call someone because the smell is so bad.

Duchaunak smiles at his own wet reflection; believes that somewhere he lost it, and then – as a second thought, close behind, heel-to-toe – he wonders if whatever he lost was never really his in the first place.

‘It is what it is,’ he whispers, and then he tugs on the light cord and closes the door as he leaves.

Harper gone, Cathy Hollander and Walt Freiberg finished their lunch. As the waiter walked away, the bill paid, Freiberg leaned forward. ‘I never trusted her,’ he said.

‘Not trusting her and killing her are two very different things,’ Cathy Hollander replied.

‘That’s as may be, but if I’m leaving when this thing is done . . . if I’m leaving New York, never to come back, then I don’t want to spend the rest of my life knowing that Evelyn Sawyer is still breathing.’

‘So what are you going to do?’ Cathy asked.

‘Do?’ Walt Freiberg asked. ‘What am I going to do? I’m going to wait until the dust has settled on this thing, wait until things quieten down, and then I’m going to go over to Carmine Street and shoot the bitch in the fucking head.’

‘Simple as that,’ Cathy Hollander replied.

Walt Freiberg rose from his chair and buttoned his jacket. ‘Sure it is,’ he said quietly, his voice almost a whisper. ‘It really is as simple as that.’

Evelyn Sawyer had slept little since her last discussion with John Harper.

She was not a woman to introspect, to turn inward and view her motives or reasons for the decisions she’d made. What was done was done; there was little that could be changed about it now, and John Harper had in some small way chosen to walk back into this life. He could have left. He could have turned around and taken the next flight back to Miami. But no, Walt Freiberg and Edward’s hooker girlfriend had been there to seduce him with their money, their lies, the faces they wore for the world.

The truth? That truth, pure and simple, was that no-one knew the whole truth. No-one but Evelyn. And she could never have told Harper. Such a thing would have broken him.

That Sunday morning she turned from where she stood at the window near the kitchen sink. Time had moved so fast. There had been no time for anything, not for herself, not for consideration of her position, nor for any kind of resolution regarding what Anne would have wished.

What
Anne
would have wished. Not what Evelyn would have wished, but what Anne would have wished.

Anne was dead. Anne had killed herself, October twelfth, 1975; maybe someone had been there . . . hell, Evelyn thought, someone
had
been there, but Anne had brought it on herself. Everyone brings their own destiny to pass.

Even she: Evelyn Sawyer, widow of Garrett Sawyer, a widow of the war.

And now another war would come, and people would die, and the old would make way for the new, and she would more than likely be left to survey the walking wounded, the dead, the damaged. Perhaps John Harper would make it through the other
side. Somehow Evelyn doubted it. John Harper had left this life. You could not leave it, and then later return and expect yourself to be prepared. You had to grow inside it, grow as part of it, and its nature had to grow within you.

This was a different world: fast, brutal, unrelenting.

This was the world Edward Bernstein had created, and though Harper was his son, would never be anything other, he was no more a part of this than his mother had been.

And look – Evelyn thought to herself – just look what happened to her. Had it not been for Anne Harper, had it not been for her weakness, then Garrett would still be alive.

‘Burn in hell,’ Evelyn Sawyer said, and her voice, there in the silence of 66 Carmine, was like the hiss of a branding iron.

She lowered her head, felt the muscles tighten in her throat, and started to cry.

‘His precise words, sir . . . no calls, no visitors.’

‘But I’m—’

‘I’m sorry sir. I cannot ignore the wishes of a guest in the hotel. The privacy of our guests becomes our responsibility from the moment they check in. I cannot put a call through to Mr Harper’s room. I hope you understand sir, but such a thing becomes a matter of the hotel’s credibility and reputation—’

‘It really is nothing more than a few words—’

‘Once again, I’m sorry sir. I don’t wish to be unhelpful, but unless there is some specific aspect of the law that has been violated I cannot override a guest’s request for privacy. Mr Harper called down this morning and stated emphatically his wish not to be disturbed. Now, if you wish to leave a message?’

‘Yes, a message . . . I’ll leave a message.’

‘Very good sir. First of all your name?’

‘Er . . . my name . . . ’

‘Yes sir, your name.’

A moment’s hesitation, and then: ‘Actually, it doesn’t matter.’

‘Sir?’

‘It doesn’t matter . . . I’m sorry to trouble you.’

‘You’re not going to leave a message?’

‘No, I’ve decided against it. Thank you anyway . . . thanks for your help.’

‘Very good sir. You have a nice day now.’

‘Yes, okay . . . yes . . . have a nice day yourself.’

The line went dead.

Duchaunak set the receiver back in the cradle. He stood motionless. Didn’t even appear to be breathing.

He thought to go there, go right over to the American Regent and demand to see John Harper. What could he say? Couldn’t say a goddamned thing. Security would throw him out. McLuhan would find out what he’d done and have him charged with harassment; either that or fire him. Could McLuhan fire him for something like that? Duchaunak believed not, but then McLuhan wouldn’t be firing him for that alone.