Special Topics in Calamity Physics (72 page)

And then—at this point I had Box Office Mojo; if they'd stuck me on a track I would've broken some hurtling records; in front of the high jump, I'd have soared
so
high, spectators would swear I had wings —I realized the truth behind the camping story Hannah had told us.

Hip injury, hip surgery, one leg shorter than the other: the man whose life she'd saved on the camping trip, the man who'd injured his hip, was George Gracey. He'd been living in the Adirondacks. Or perhaps she'd invented that detail; maybe he'd been hiding along the Appalachian Trail or in the Great Smokies like the Vicious Three detailed in
Escaped
(Pillars, 2004). Perhaps this was why Hannah had become a seasoned mountaineer; it'd been her responsibility to bring him food and supplies, keep him alive. And presently, he was living in Paxos, an island off the western coast of Greece, and Greece was where Hannah had told Eva Brewster she longed to go at the beginning of every St. Gallway school year, so she could "love herself."

But then—why had she decided to tell me her Life Story in such a roundabout way? Why had she been living in Stockton, not with Gracey in Greece? And what were the present movements of
Na
chtlich —
if any at all? (Solving crime-related questions was like trying to rid one's house of rodents; you kill one, blink, six more dart across the floor.)

Perhaps Hannah had decided to tell me because she sensed I, out of all the Bluebloods, had the wits to solve the riddle of her life (Jade and the others weren't methodical enough; Milton, for one, had the mind—and body, for that matter—of a Jersey Cow).
"Ten years from now—that's when you decide,"
Hannah had said. Obviously, she'd wanted someone to know the truth, and not now—later, after she'd staged her disappearance. The night I'd shown up on her doorstep, she'd undoubtedly known all about Ada Harvey, and had been uneasy about what that dogged and determined Southern Belle (desperate to avenge the death of Big Daddy) might uncover and reveal to the FBI: Hannah's true identity and crime.

She and Gracey
couldn't
be together for security's sake; they were still wanted by the Feds and thus it was crucial to cut off all contact, reside on opposite sides of the globe. Or else, their romance had gone flat as uncapped Pellegrino; "The shelf life of any great love is fifteen years," wrote Wendy Aldridge, Ph.D., in
The Truth About Ever After
(1999). "After that you need a serious preservative, which can seriously harm your health."

The resounding belief was that, even today,
Na
chtlich
was alive and well. (Littleton supported this claim though he had no evidence. Dad was more skeptical.) "Thanks to inspirational recruitment," wrote Guillaume on www.hautain.fr, "they have more members than ever. But you can't go and join. That's how they remain unseen. They choose
you. They
decide if you're suitable." In November 2000, an executive at the center of an accounting fraud, Mark Lecinque, had unexpectedly hanged himself at his family home twenty minutes north of Baton Rouge, a pistol—fully loaded, apart for a single bullet—was found on the floor next to him. His apparent suicide was a shock, because Lecinque and his lawyers had acted smug and haughty when interviewed on network television. It was thus whispered his death had been the vigilante work of
Les Veilleurs
de Nuit.

Other countries, too, claimed similar silent assassinations of bigwigs, magnates, industrialists and corrupt officials. The anonymous editor-in-chief of www.newworldkuomintang.org wrote that between 1980 and the present, more than 330 moguls in thirty-nine countries, including Saudi Arabia (men with a combined net worth of $400 billion) had been "quietly, efficiently disposed of" thanks to The Nightwatchmen, and though it was unclear if such sudden deaths actually benefited the downtrodden and oppressed, at the very least, it sent corporations into a temporary state of upheaval, forcing them to focus immediate attentions on resolving internal leadership problems, rather than looking outward to the land and people they might sacrifice to turn a profit. Countless employees also started to complain of a steep decline in productivity in the years following the death of the CEO or various trustees— what some referred to as a "never-ending bureaucratic nightmare." It was nearly impossible to get any work done or for anyone to make a final decision, because so many managers from different departments were required to sign off on the tiniest of ideas. Some Web sites, particularly those out of Germany, suggested members
of Na
chtlich
were employed as supervisors at these behemoth conglomerates, their aim being to fan the flames of inertia by means of endless mandatory paperwork, circuitous checks and balances and labyrinthine red tape. Thus, the corporation, day after day, burning millions in what was becoming an endless waiting game, would "slowly eat itself from the inside out" (see www.verschworung.de/firmaalptraume).

I
liked to believe
Na
chtlich
was still active, because it meant Hannah, during her monthly trip to Cottonwood, had not been collecting men like they were tin cans she'd hoped to recycle as we'd all believed. No, she'd been engaged in prearranged encounters, "private one-on-ones" intended to
appear
like seedy one-night stands, while in fact, they were a platonic exchange of vital information. And perhaps it'd been Doc, sweet Doc with his relief
-
map face and retractable trellis legs who'd informed Hannah about the recent movements and probing inquiries of Smoke Harvey and following
that
rendezvous—the first week of November—Hannah decided she had to kill him. She had no choice, if she wished to preserve her former lover's hiding place in Paxos, his sanctum sanctorum.

But how had she done it?

It was the question that stumped Ada Harvey, but after reading about the other
Na
chtlich
assassinations, I could now answer it with my eyes closed (also with a little help from Connault Helig's
Machinations Idyllic and Unseen).

If rumor could be believed, The Nightwatchmen, following their post-January 1974 creed of invisibility, employed correspondingly traceless murder techniques. Their repertoire had to include something akin to "The Flying Demoiselle," described in
The History of Lynching in the American South
(Kittson, 1966). (In my opinion, Mark Lecinque of Baton Rouge had been killed this way, as his death was ruled a straightforward suicide.) They also must use another, more impermeable method, a procedure first documented by Connault Helig, the London surgeon summoned by a bamboozled police force to examine the body of Mary Kelly, the fifth and final victim of Leather Apron, commonly known as Jack the Ripper. A venerated, if furtive man of medicine and science, in Chapter 3, Helig details at length what he considers to be "the only flawless stealthy execution that exists in all the world"

It was flawless because technically it wasn't murder, but a calculated setup of fatal circumstances. The plan was executed not by one person, but by a "consortium between five and thirteen like-minded gentlemen," who each, on the chosen day, independently committed an act assigned by the central planner, "the engineer" (p. 21). Viewed individually, these acts were lawful, even ordinary, and yet in a concentrated period of time, they combined to elicit a "perfectly lethal state of affairs, in which the intended victim has no choice but to die" (p. 22). "Each man acts alone," he writes on p. 21. "He does not know the faces, actions or even the final aim of those with whom he operates. Such ignorance is imperative, for his lack of knowledge maintains his virtue. Only the engineer will know the design from inception to end."

Detailed knowledge of the victim's personal and professional life was mandatory, in order to effectively isolate the "ideal poison" to facilitate the "slaying" (pp. 23-25). It could be any possession, weakness, physical handicap or idiosyncrasy of the doomed individual—a cherished gun collection, perhaps, the steep flight of stairs outside Belgravia townhouse (which became "startlingly slippery in the wee hours of a brisk February morning"), a secret affinity for opium, foxhunting upon skittish stallions, hobnobbing under rickety bridges with disease-ridden streetwalkers or most conveniently of all, a daily dose of medication prescribed by the family physician—the concept being that all weapons utilized against the prey were his/her own, and thus the death would appear accidental to even the "craftiest and most inventive of investigators" (p. 26).

This was how Hannah had done it—rather, how
they'd
done it, because I doubted she'd acted alone at the costume party, but had a number of ghouls to assist her, most of them conveniently wearing masks—
Elvis: Aloha from Hawaii,
maybe;
he'd
looked squinty eyed and suspicious, or the astronaut Nigel and I had overheard speaking Greek to the Chinese woman in the gorilla suit. ("Membership expanded not only in America but internationally," reported Jacobus on www.deechtewaarheid.nl.)

"The primary gentleman, whom we shall hereafter refer to as One, will prepare the poisons prior to the day in question," Helig writes on p. 31.

Hannah had been One. She'd ingratiated herself with Smoke, pinpointed his poisons: his blood-pressure medication, Minipress, and his favorite booze, Jameson, Bushmills, maybe Tullamore Dew
("He liked his whiskey . . . I won't lie about that,"
Ada had said). According to www.drug data.com the medicine was "incompatible with alcoholic beverages," and when combined, the individual may suffer the effects of "syncope," dizziness, disorientation, even a loss of consciousness. Hannah herself had acquired the drug—or perhaps she'd had it already; perhaps that nineteen-bottle stash of prescription pills in her bedroom cabinet was never for herself, but for her hit jobs. She pulverized a predetermined quantity (the exact amount of the daily dosage, so the elevated levels of the drug discovered in the autopsy could be easily explained in the absence of other signs of foul play; the coroner would assume the victim accidentally took his dosage twice on the day in question). She dissolved the powdered drug into the alcohol and served it to him when he arrived at the party.

"One," writes Helig on p. 42, "is accountable for relaxing the victim, ensuring his defenses are down. It may serve the group well if One is a person of great physical beauty and charm."

They passed Nigel and me on the stairs, went to her bedroom, talked, and shortly thereafter, Hannah excused herself, maybe under the guise of getting them another drink, taking both glasses with her, heading downstairs to the kitchen, rinsing them out in the sink, destroying the only piece of incriminating evidence in the entire plot—and so concluding what Helig designated the initial setup, "The First Act." She never returned to him for the rest of the night.

The Second Act comprised the seemingly random relay race that "gently guides the man toward his own conclusion" (p. 51). Hannah must have known Smoke would wear the olive-green Red Army uniform, and thus the assigned individuals knew not only his physical description but also what costume to watch for. Two, Three, Four, Five (and I wasn't certain how many there were)—they appeared at prearranged locations, approaching him, introducing themselves, handing him another drink, chatting breathlessly as they escorted him from the bedroom, down the stairs, outside onto the patio, each of them bold, engaging, ostensibly drunk. Perhaps one or two of them were men, but the majority were women. (Ernest Hemingway, who wasn't keen on the fair sex, wrote, "a young dame with pretty eyes and a smile can make an old man do just about anything" [p. 278,
Journals,
Hemingway,

This carefully choreographed relay continued for an hour or two until Smoke was positioned by the edge of the pool, his face swollen and red, his eyes unable to pick themselves up off the scales and angel wings and dorsal fins to see where he was standing. His head was a bag of feed for chickens. That was the moment Six, standing in a group, bumped into him, making him lose his balance, fall, and Seven —Seven must have been one of the rats playing Marco Polo —made certain he was helpless, if not holding his head under water, then simply ensuring he splashed, drifted to the opposite end of the pool, the deep end, and was left alone.

And so the victim dies, completing the Second Act, "the most noteworthy Act of our little tragedy" (p. 68). The Third Act begins the moment the body is found, ending with each implicated person "dispersing into the world like the withered petals off a dead flower, never to come together again"

(p. 98).

I rubbed my eyes after scribbling this last bit into my CASE NOTES (now occupying twelve pages of a college-ruled legal pad), threw down my pen and pressed my head into the back of Dad's office chair. The house was quiet. In the lone window by the ceiling, darkness clung like a flimsy nightgown. The wood-paneled wall, where my mother's six cases of butterflies and moths had once hung, stared back at me, expressionless.

Remembering old Smoke Harvey, shadowing him through the costume party, his Long Night's Journey into Death — it rained all over the parade of secret revolution against corporate greed.

That was the problem with causes, the cheap toy within their Happy Meal; inevitably, there came a point when they looked exactly like their enemy, when they became what they fought so hard against. Freedom, Democracy—the big breathy words people shouted with their fists in the air (or else whispered, wimpy looks in their eyes)—they were beautiful mail-order brides from far-flung countries, and no matter how long you insisted they stick around, when you actually took a good look at them (when you stopped feeling woozy in their presence), you noticed they never
actually
fit in; they barely learned the customs or language. Their transplant from a textbook into the real world was slipshod, rickety at best.