Think Of a Number (2010) (3 page)

“Davey!” he cried, extending his hand.

Davey?
wondered Gurney.

“My God!” Mellery went on. “You look the same! God, it’s good to see you! Great to see you looking the way you do! Davey Gurney! Back at Fordham they used to say you looked like Robert Redford in
All the President’s Men
. Still do—haven’t changed a bit! If I didn’t know you were forty-seven like me, I’d say you were thirty!”

He clasped Gurney’s hand with both of his as though it were a precious object. “Driving over today, from Peony to Walnut Crossing, I was remembering how calm and collected you always were. An emotional oasis—that’s what you were, an emotional oasis! And you still have that look. Davey Gurney—calm, cool, and collected—plus the sharpest mind in town. How have you been?”

“I’ve been fortunate,” said Gurney, extricating his hand and speaking in a voice as devoid of excitement as Mellery’s was full of it. “I have no complaints.”

“Fortunate …” Mellery enunciated the syllables as if trying to recall the meaning of a foreign word. “It’s a nice place you have here. Very nice.”

“Madeleine has a good eye for these things. Shall we have a
seat?” Gurney motioned toward a pair of weathered Adirondack chairs facing each other between the apple tree and a birdbath.

Mellery started in the direction indicated, then stopped. “I had something …”

“Could this be it?” Madeleine was walking toward them from the house, holding in front of her an elegant briefcase. Understated and expensive, it was like everything else in Mellery’s appearance—from the handmade (but comfortably broken in and not too highly polished) English shoes to the beautifully tailored (but gently rumpled) cashmere sport jacket—a look seemingly calculated to say that here stood a man who knew how to use money without letting money use him, a man who had achieved success without worshipping it, a man to whom good fortune came naturally. A harried look about his eyes, however, conveyed a different message.

“Ah, yes, thank you,” said Mellery, accepting the briefcase from Madeleine with obvious relief. “But where …?”

“You laid it on the coffee table.”

“Yes, of course. My brain is kind of scattered today. Thank you!”

“Would you like something to drink?”

“Drink?”

“We have some iced tea already made. Or, if you’d prefer something else …?”

“No, no, iced tea would be fine. Thank you.”

As Gurney observed his old classmate, it suddenly occurred to him what Madeleine had meant when she said that Mellery looked exactly like his book jacket photograph, “only more so.”

The quality most evident in the photograph was a kind of informal perfection—the illusion of a casual, amateur snapshot without the unflattering shadows or awkward composition of an actual amateur snapshot. It was exactly that sense of carefully crafted carelessness—the ego-driven desire to appear ego-free—that Mellery exemplified in person. As usual, Madeleine’s perception had been on target.

“In your e-mail you mentioned a problem,” said Gurney with a get-to-the-point abruptness verging on rudeness.

“Yes,” Mellery answered, but instead of addressing it, he offered a reminiscence that seemed designed to weave another little thread of obligation into the old school tie, recounting a silly debate a classmate of theirs had gotten into with a philosophy professor. During the telling of this tale, Mellery referred to himself, Gurney, and the protagonist as the “Three Musketeers” of the Rose Hill campus, striving to make something sophomoric sound heroic. Gurney found the effort embarrassing and offered his guest no response beyond an expectant stare.

“Well,” said Mellery, turning uncomfortably to the matter at hand, “I’m not sure where to begin.”

If you don’t know where to begin your own story
, thought Gurney,
why the hell are you here?

Mellery finally opened his briefcase, withdrew two slim softcover books, and handed them, with care, as if they were fragile, to Gurney. They were the books described in the website printouts he had looked at earlier. One was called
The Only Thing That Matters
and was subtitled
The Power of Conscience to Change Lives
. The other was called
Honestly!
and was subtitled
The Only Way to Be Happy
.

“You may not have heard of these books. They were moderately successful, but not exactly blockbusters.” Mellery smiled with what looked like a well-practiced imitation of humility. “I’m not suggesting you need to read them right now.” He smiled again, as though this were amusing. “However, they may give you some clue to what’s happening, or why it’s happening, once I explain my problem … or perhaps I should say my
apparent
problem. The whole business has me a bit confused.”

And more than a bit frightened
, mused Gurney.

Mellery took a long breath, paused, then began his story like a man walking with fragile determination into a cold surf.

“I should tell you first about the notes I’ve received.” He reached into his briefcase, withdrew two envelopes, opened one, took from it a sheet of white paper with handwriting on one side and a smaller envelope of the size that might be used for an RSVP. He handed the paper to Gurney.

“This was the first communication I received, about three weeks ago.”

Gurney took the paper and settled back in his chair to examine it, noting at once the neatness of the handwriting. The words were precisely, elegantly formed—stirring a sudden recollection of Sister Mary Joseph’s script moving gracefully across a grammar-school blackboard. But even stranger than the painstaking penmanship was the fact that the note had been written with a fountain pen, and in red ink.
Red ink?
Gurney’s grandfather had had red ink. He had little round bottles of blue, green, and red ink. He remembered so little of his grandfather, but he remembered the ink. Could one still purchase red ink for a fountain pen?

Gurney read the note with a deepening frown, then read it again. There was neither a salutation nor a signature.

Gurney uttered a noncommittal grunt and looked inquiringly at Mellery, who had been staring at him intently as he read. “Do you have any idea who sent you this?”

“None whatever.”

“Any suspicions?”

“None.”

“Hmm. Did you play the game?”

“The game?” Clearly Mellery had not thought of it that way. “If what you mean is, did I think of a number, yes, I did. Under the circumstances it would have been difficult not to.”

“So you thought of a number?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

Mellery cleared his throat. “The number I thought of was six-five-eight.” He repeated it, articulating the digits—
six, five, eight
—as though they might mean something to Gurney. When he saw that they didn’t, he took a nervous breath and went on.

“The number six fifty-eight has no particular significance to me. It just happened to be the first number that came to mind. I’ve racked my brains, trying to remember anything I might associate it with, any reason I might have picked it, but I couldn’t come up with a single thing.
It’s just the first number that came to mind,”
he insisted with panicky earnestness.

Gurney gazed at him with growing interest. “And in the smaller envelope …?”

Mellery handed him the other envelope that was enclosed with the note and watched closely as he opened it, extracted a piece of notepaper half the size of the first, and read the message written in the same delicate style, the same red ink:

After reading the note again, Gurney asked Mellery whether he had responded to it.

“Yes. I sent a check for the amount mentioned.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a lot of money. Why did you decide to send it?”

“Because it was driving me crazy. The number—how could he know?”

“Has the check cleared?”

“No, as a matter of fact, it hasn’t,” said Mellery. “I’ve been monitoring my account daily. That’s why I sent a check instead of cash. I thought it might be a good idea to know something about this Arybdis person—at least know where he deposited his checks. I mean, the whole tone of the thing was so unsettling.”

“What exactly unsettled you?”

“The number, obviously!” cried Mellery. “How could he possibly know such a thing?”

“Good question,” said Gurney. “Why do you say ‘he’?”

“What? Oh, I see what you mean. I just thought … I don’t know, it’s just what came to mind. I suppose ‘X. Arybdis’ sounded masculine for some reason.”

“X. Arybdis. Odd sort of name,” said Gurney. “Does it mean anything to you? Ring any bell at all?”

“None.”

The name meant nothing to Gurney, but it did not seem completely unfamiliar, either. Whatever it was, it was buried in a subbasement mental filing cabinet.

“After you sent the check, were you contacted again?”

“Oh, yes!” said Mellery, once more reaching into his briefcase and pulling out two other sheets of paper. “I received this one about ten days ago. And this one the day after I sent you my e-mail asking if we could get together.” He thrust them toward Gurney like a little boy showing his father two new bruises.

They appeared to be written by the same meticulous hand with the same pen as the pair of notes in the earlier communication, but the tone had changed.

The first was composed of eight short lines:

The eight lines of the second were similarly cryptic and menacing:

Over the next ten minutes, during which he read each note half a dozen times, Gurney’s expression grew darker and Mellery’s angst more obvious.

“What do you think?” Mellery finally asked.

“You have a clever enemy.”

“I mean, what do you think about the number business?”

“What about it?”

“How could he know what number would come to my mind?”

“Offhand, I would say he couldn’t know.”

“He couldn’t know, but he did! I mean, that’s the whole thing isn’t? He couldn’t know, but he did! No one could possibly know that the number six fifty-eight would be the number I would think of, but not only did he know it—he knew it at least two days before I did, when he put the damn letter in the mail!”

Mellery suddenly heaved himself up from his chair, pacing across the grass toward the house, then back again, running his hands through his hair.

“There’s no scientific way to do that. There’s no conceivable way of doing it. Don’t you see how crazy this is?”

Gurney was resting his chin thoughtfully on the tips of his
fingers. “There’s a simple philosophical principle that I find one hundred percent reliable.
If something happens, it must have a way of happening
. This number business must have a simple explanation.”

“But …”

Gurney raised his hand like the serious young traffic cop he had been for his first six months in the NYPD. “Sit down. Relax. I’m sure we can figure it out.”

M
adeleine brought a pair of iced teas to the two men and returned to the house. The smell of warm grass filled the air. The temperature was close to seventy. A swarm of purple finches descended on the thistle-seed feeders. The sun, the colors, the aromas were intense, but wasted on Mellery, whose anxious thoughts seemed to occupy him completely.

As they sipped their teas, Gurney tried to assess the motives and honesty of his guest. He knew that labeling someone too early in the game could lead to mistakes, but doing so was often irresistible. The main thing was to be aware of the fallibility of the process and be willing to revise the label as new information became available.

His gut feeling was that Mellery was a classic phony, a pretender on many levels, who to some extent believed his own pretenses. His accent, for example, which had been present even in the college days, was an accent from nowhere, from some imaginary place of culture and refinement. Surely it was no longer put on—it was an integral part of him—but its roots lay in imaginary soil. The expensive haircut, the moisturized skin, the flawless teeth, the exercised physique, and the manicured fingernails suggested a top-shelf televangelist. His manner was that of a man eager to appear at ease in the world, a man in cool possession of everything that eludes ordinary humans. Gurney realized all this had been present in a nascent form twenty-six years earlier. Mark Mellery had simply become more of what he’d always been.

“Had it occurred to you to go to the police?” asked Gurney.

“I didn’t think there was any point. I didn’t think they’d do anything. What could they do? There was no specific threat, nothing that couldn’t be explained away, no actual crime. I didn’t have anything concrete to take to them. A couple of nasty little poems? A warped high-school kid could have written them, someone with a weird sense of humor. And since the police wouldn’t really do anything or, worse yet, would treat it as a joke, why would I waste my time going to them?”