Tunnel of Night (31 page)

I looked down at the slivers of chicken breast adrift in a sea of maple syrup and slices of Mandarin orange. “Smells good,” I said.

“It’s probably cold.”

I tasted it. “Warm.”

Lane’s plate was empty. I winked and smiled. “You eat too fast,” I told her.

She shook her head. “You’re impossible.”

I had decided to leave the matter of Wolf’s metal box and his obsession with me for a later conversation, preferably after the bastard was dead. Lane knew that I was the focus of Wolf’s rage, and I could see nothing to be gained by alarming her even more.

The chicken was excellent, the wild rice cooked to perfection. I wished that I had eaten when it was still hot.

“So, what do you think of the Knicks this year?” Lane said, laughing.

“Watch out for the Miami Heat,” I said.

I sipped my ale.

“Pop?”

“What, Lanie?”

“When did you start paying any attention to basketball? I said something about Michael Jordan the other day, and you didn’t even know who he was.”

“Is that what we were talking about?”

“You glanced at a sports page.”

Lane was well aware of my propensity for eidetic recall. While skimming through a book or newspaper, I might catch a glimpse of a page, then later reproduce it as a visual image in my memory.

“Guilty,” I said.

“You know, sometimes I wish I’d gotten that particular gene. Then, other times, I’m glad that I didn’t.”

“What you only see can often get in the way,” I said.

I was ready to give Lane my standard lecture on experience—the appreciation of all the senses—but I had distracted myself.

What you only see can get in the way. What happens when your eyes adjust to the darkness? What about what you don’t see—or hear, or smell, or feel? Wolf’s reference to the underground had triggered my association to the Flume
.

What was John Wolf leaving for me to see? What was I seeing that was getting in the way? I had been so visually oriented that I thought I was missing something. It had nothing to do with what I wasn’t visualizing.

The pages from Peterson. I had locked on their content
.

“Pop?”

“Let’s walk,” I said, getting up from the table.

“What is it?”

“I want to walk,” I said. “Initial the check.”

I headed for the door.

“Was everything satisfactory, Dr. Frank?”

I stopped. I had heard. I could still taste the maple syrup. I looked at the maitre d’ and had no trouble managing a smile. Sometimes these automatic behaviors can be a problem. “Most enjoyable,” I said.

I shoved the door open and stepped out onto the sidewalk. I fumbled through my pockets looking for a cigarette, lit it, and sucked down the hot, soothing drug.

Lane came through the door. “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” she said.

I handed her the package. “You can trash that.”

“You’ve said that before.”

“Until the next time,” I said. “Come on.”

I started walking—threw the cigarette into the street—walked faster.

Lane was almost trotting to keep up. “You’ve got him, haven’t you,” she said from behind.

“Hell, no. I’ve just recognized my own stupidity. You out of shape?”

She caught up. “God, you can be a royal pain.”

“I do my best.”

“Where are we going?”

“For a walk. Tell me what you see.”

“I’d rather hear about your trip,” she said. “Okay. I see buildings. Hotels, government offices, restaurants.”

“Look closer.”

“I see glass, bricks, steel, people …”

“Closer.”

“Cracks in the glass,” she said, struggling to keep up with me. “Posters on the walls.”

I took the left onto Tenth Street and stopped. I pointed across Pennsylvania Avenue. “The Justice Department,” I said. “Law and order. Be nice if we ever had it. Big crook used to hang out there. John Mitchell.”

I pointed to my left.

“Ford’s Theater,” Lane said, “where Samantha Becker worked.”

“Piece of history, isn’t it,” I said, gazing up. “Do you remember the play?”

“Our American Cousin.
April 14, 1865.”

“The audience was laughing. Most of them never heard the sound of the shot.”

“Booth got away on horseback. Later, they shot him. They said he was resisting arrest.”

“Down there,” I said, pointing to my left. “Peterson
House. They carried the president there. He died in the back bedroom. They still have the pillow that his head rested on. Bloodstained. Under glass. Like pheasant.”

What you see can get in the way
.

“What do you hear, Lane?”

“Pop…”

“Do it,” I said, looking up at the building that a southern fanatic had rendered memorable.

“Traffic. Voices. A plane going over.”

“Listen,” I said. “Nighthawks. They spend most of their time on the wing, snapping insects out of the evening sky. They’re common in urban areas.”

Lane looked up into the blackness. “I can’t see them.”

“That’s the point,” I said.

When everything is black, effectively we are blind and must rely on our other senses
.

Wolf knew that I would get hung up on feathers and birds and his ascension from the dead. I would look up, even into the blackest sky What I should have known was that I had to look back to where he had come from, beneath the earth.

Underground
.

“I’ve been looking in the wrong direction,” I said. “He’s not soaring through the evening sky. His game has something to do with tunnels.”

“You confronted him in the cellar.”

“His home. He went deeper before rising up from his own ashes.”

“Pop, this city is laced with tunnels. The subway, all the government buildings.”

It wasn’t enough for Wolf that I was in Washington. He wanted me to join him for his fireworks underground. A year ago, I had been the hunter and had
tracked Wolf to his lair. Now, I was the hunted. Would he come to my lair?

“What about the Willard?” I asked.

“Oh, Jesus, Pop.”

“There has to be a basement of some sort. Maybe there’s something below that. Wolf has already demonstrated that he knows the building.”

A cool breeze whirled dust up around us. “Let’s go back,” I said. “I’ll call Jackson.”

For the first time since our arrival in the capital, I felt as if I was beginning to get a grasp on my phantom. I imagined the sketch of the nighthawk in Peterson’s
Field Guide.
Eidetic recall: page 101.

Only the last digit mattered.

THAT NIGHT, AS I SAT SILENTLY ALONE IN MY
room, Hiram Jackson returned my call to his pager. After I had explained my thinking, he said, “I’ll get a team of specialists down in that cellar tonight.”

“How long will it take?”

“There are probably foreign delegations staying there. We’ll have to be discreet, get the Secret Service involved, work with the hotel’s management. With an old building like that, there’s no way to tell how much area they’ll have to cover. I don’t know how long this will take. We’ll move as fast as we can. We don’t want an international incident.”

“Hiram, Wolf’s messages were in the page numbers from the bird book. It’s a countdown.”

“How much time?”

“I figure we’ve got about thirty hours.”

Jackson said he would get back to me.

I did what I knew I would eventually have to do. I
began to stroke the back of the beast who lived so deep within me. He shifted uncomfortably, jerking his head from side to side.

I remembered that night so many years ago, after the attempted robbery at Amanda’s, after the police had questioned me. I sat in my small room listening to the sound of the waves lapping across the sand. I took pencil and paper, and wrote down the few words that rattled around in my mind.

I had slipped out the window that night, and climbed down through the branches of the old lilac I walked on the beach, then sat in the deep sand, shivering, watching as the sky grew lighter in the east. The blood on my T-shirt looked black.

I was afraid that I had shattered along with the face that I had plunged through the glass counter. There was the restlessness inside then, too—the glaring eyes, the muscular, hunched shoulders. My African lowlands gorilla refused to be quieted.

I AWAKENED IN THE CHAIR WITH THE FIRST LIGHT
of the D.C morning. My eyes felt as if they were filled with beach sand.

I called room service for coffee, then retrieved the newspaper from the hall.

John Wolf’s face was on page one.

OVER COFFEE IN THE FBI ACADEMY’S CAFETERIA
, I gazed at my image on the front page of the Washington
Blade.
It was not a bad rendition of a former life. Amazing what a skilled artist and a computer can do.

I glanced around the room at agents and students carrying their trays of eggs, toast, and juice. A few carried newspapers.

Two young men in jumpsuits sat across from me. One of them immediately unfolded his copy of the
Blade.
“You see this, Red?” he asked his partner.

Red glanced at the composite, skimmed the first paragraphs of the story, nodded, then went about the business of inhaling his omelet. “We got twenty minutes, Louie,” he said.

And I had twenty-four hours until my final scene— the purest form of justice.

The Quantico people—the few who paid any attention at all—seemed to be growing accustomed to my presence.

When all other drives and desires have passed,
burned themselves out on the dying embers of age and impotence, the one pure motivation remains.

Vengeance.

It has always been there. Not just for me, although I have nurtured it properly, sheltered it, forced it to blossom like white narcissus in winter. Rocks, water, bulbs, and an explosion into bloom.

Vengeance.

The affluent residents of Greenwich, not far from my former home in Hasty Hills, Connecticut, summoned their Hispanic servants to wipe their kids’ asses, clean the stains off the sheets they stole from hotels in Palm Springs or Aruba. They paid no taxes for their ass wipers and sheet washers.

The Lord said vengeance was his. Fuck him if he can’t take a joke.

In New Hampshire, a school board refused to allow the movie
Platoon
to be shown to a class on American affairs. Too much violence, too many murders. It was their war that I had attended. They owned the murders. How did they want it portrayed? As a barbecue under the fronds?

Vengeance.

Anything else is impure, dishonest.

Today I can feel the rolling waves of Sibelius’s second symphony. The cellos, the violins, the horns, the timpani, vibrate on the surface of my skin. I have the spirit, the soul of the assassin. It is all that I have ever wanted.

I reached across the table and tapped my photo in Red’s newspaper. “Interesting man,” I said.

“Yes, sir. Sick. If he’s even alive.”

“I had some minor involvement with that case,” I continued. “I’m John Krogh, by the way. I’m a visiting
anthropology consultant. I think it would be possible to survive an explosion like that. Not terribly likely, though.”

“What was your involvement, sir?” Red asked.

The cadet was not at all interested. He was humoring an old bone man while he filled his face with food.

“Two cases that remain on the books as unsolved, although I was convinced that they were Wolf’s work. The victims—the odd collection of bones that were left of the young women, at least—were found within a mile of one another. Rural area in Connecticut. Raccoons and coyotes had been at them. They’d eaten most of the flesh, of course.”

He slowed his ingestion of eggs.

In Vermont, after Lucas Frank shot me, I had seen ghosts on the road. As I drove north, shapes and faces curled up like smoke from the snow-covered highway. White shapes with gray faces in the black night. I rolled down the window to keep myself conscious. Then I heard the ghosts howling in the night.

It is merely the wind, I told myself as hands reached out and grabbed at me, then were blown aside by the snarling, whining wind, winding itself up in cyclonelike coils.

Vengeance.

In the subway station at Park Square, Boston, just after I came home from the war, an old drunk told me that I was why we were losing Vietnam.

“Fuckin’ got no balls,” he said, trying to burn his eyes into mine. “You’re a loser. I fought in the big one.”

He hated me, but as he continued to stare, the blaze faded from his eyes. It was replaced with confusion. His grip relaxed, and he stepped backward. He was afraid of what he saw in my eyes.

“You’re fuckin’ crazy,” he said.

I moved toward him as he backed away.

He waved his arms. “Stay away from me.”

He was moving away fast, but I would not let him go. I gripped his coat and spun him around.

“No,” he pleaded.

When a subway cop grabbed me, the old man ran.

“What the fuck?” the cop said, and I plunged a knife deep into his gut.