Soft Apocalypses (10 page)

“What?”

“I really appreciate being used as ghost bait,
Dad
. And Linda, she sure appreciates being murdered.”

The color had drained from his face. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Really? Maybe this will jog your memory.”

She pulled Linda’s drawing from its hiding place under her jacket and turned the image toward her father.

At least fifty people crowded outside the police tape surrounding Professor Burke’s broken body at the base of Clay Tower: tired-looking EMTs, grim-faced cops, whispering faculty, and students surreptitiously filming the carnage with their cell phones.

“... so you’re saying he threw the chair through his window, and jumped out after it?” the police detective asked Emma.

“Yes sir.”

“And he didn’t say why?”

“I ... didn’t know my father very well,” she replied. “Maybe something was bothering him that he never talked about.”

“Maybe.” The detective flipped his notebook closed. “In any case, I’m sorry for your loss, Miss.”

In a strange way, Emma realized, so was she.

Abandonment Option

Martin Bennington graduated at the top of his Harvard MBA class, sat on the boards of the noblest charities, dined at the most lavish restaurants, bedded the most beautiful models, and ran the best-respected investment firm on Wall Street.

Now, he was standing naked before a bored Bureau of Prisons officer at the Lynchwood Federal Correctional Institution. The gray, vinyl-tiled floor was simultaneously gritty and sticky underneath his bare feet.

“Lift up your scrotum,” ordered the officer.

Martin did as he was told, chagrined to see how far his penis had retreated from the chilly room. He also wondered what any man could possibly hide behind his testicles. A file? A knife? Plastic explosives? That would take quite a pair.

“Turn around, bend over, and spread your cheeks.”

His lawyer had advised him to go to his “happy place” once those words were uttered. Martin was a man who usually liked to live in the moment. And so, as unfriendly gloved fingers probed his most tender places, it was difficult to imagine he’d ever spent pleasant days entertaining starlets at the Isle of Capri and Bora Bora, but he closed his eyes and did his best.

Finally, the strip-search was over, and the officer told him to gather up his clothes. He led Martin into another room where he received a pair of tan polyester prison pants and matching shirt along with scratchy white underwear, undershirt and socks. Tacky slip-on sneakers completed the ensemble. Martin gave his street clothes to the receiving clerk, who dropped them into a cardboard box that would be shipped back to Martin’s wife. She probably wouldn’t even notice the delivery; she was too busy fending off the Feds in an effort to keep the Florida mansion he’d put in her name. The media probably weren’t helping, either.

After getting dressed and signing off on the inventory form, the guards took Martin to yet another room where he was photographed for his prison ID card and then fingerprinted. A male nurse came in with more paperwork but no blood pressure cuff or stethoscope.

“How’s your health?” asked the nurse, not looking up from the clipboard.

“Fit as a fiddle,” Martin lied.

Not quite twelve months before, Martin was sitting in his doctor’s office.

“You know the fatigue you’ve been feeling, and the shortness of breath you’ve been experiencing at the gym?”

Martin nodded, already suspecting and fearing the answer.

“The tests confirmed it’s congestive heart failure: your heart muscle has gotten stiff and so the chambers aren’t filling like they should. It’s causing fluid to back up in your lungs. But I don’t want you to panic ... this is treatable. We’re going to keep you on the Lotensin but also put you on Lasix, which is a diuretic that should help reduce a lot of your symptoms.

“Your diet’s really important here,” his doctor continued. “Stick to chicken and fish and eat lots of veggies. And I really want you to watch your salt intake. If I see you eating any more caviar canapés down at the country club, I’m going to kick your well-insured ass from here to Honolulu. If your ticker gets worse, we’ll have to find you a replacement—and even with
your
resources, that won’t be easy.”

“I’ll watch my diet,” Martin said, lifting his hand with three fingers raised. “Scout’s honor.”

Before reporting for his 10-year prison sentence, Martin had his driver take him to a nearby steakhouse, where he dropped what was left of his pocket money on a lunch of fried shrimp and a thick New York strip. He limited himself to a single glass of mediocre Bordeaux; his lawyer had warned of dire consequences if he showed up at the FCI even slightly inebriated.

The briny red meat had worked its way into his blood, and his vision twitched with every beat of his straining heart.

“For some reason, we haven’t received your PSI paperwork yet.” The unit manager handed Martin a package of flimsy white towels and sheets topped with a package of basic toiletries. The manager’s hands shook ever so slightly, and Martin saw a few drops of sweat on the man’s tanned brow. “So you’ll have to go to the Secure Housing Unit until we get those documents and can finish processing you. Then you’ll be transferred to the Camp dorm.”

Martin slipped his fingers inside the towel stack to ensure that the object he’d requested was there, then indulged in a grim smile. If his lawyers had done their jobs, he’d never have to see the inside of the inmate dormitory, and he’d have to endure the cell for a few hours at the most. He took a deep breath, trying to steady himself for what was going to happen next ....

“Money isn’t everything,” his father had told him once they were ensconced in the back of the limo after Martin’s MBA graduation ceremony. “Luck matters a whole lot more in this world. If you have enough luck, the money comes practically on its own. The thing that they probably didn’t tell you in those fancy economics classes of yours is that the phenomenon we call luck is actually a commodity just like everything else. It can be bought and sold, although only a fool sells off his own luck.”

The elder Bennington drained his martini glass down to the olive; Martin was quick to pour the old man another from the limousine’s wet bar. The old man grinned. “Do you think you’re ready to find out why our family has been so damn lucky?”

Something in his father’s tone sent a chill up young Martin’s spine. “Of course I am, Dad.”

His father laughed and steadied his drink with a practiced hand as the driver slammed the accelerator and the limo lurched up the I-84 onramp. “Of course you think you’re ready. When I was your age, I was ready to drink the whisky barrels dry, ready to fuck a thousand girls, ready to take Wall Street by the balls and make ‘em all beg for mercy. But I was most definitely not ready to see what my father showed me. What I’m going to show you tonight. We’ll see what you’re made of after that.”

Once they were back at the family mansion in Westport, Martin’s father took him into his study.

“Someone once said that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” his father said as he pulled some old leather-bound law texts off one of his polished bookshelves to reveal a keypad behind them. “I would disagree with that; once you’ve seen magic—the real kind, not that David Copperfield bullshit—you’re not going to confuse it with a Cray or a jumbo jet.”

The old man finished punching in a long string of numbers, and one of the bookshelves at the back of the room emitted a click and swung a few inches away from the wall.

“But I will make a truer version of that statement: possessing sufficient amounts of accurate information becomes indistinguishable from possessing an unusual amount of luck.” Martin’s father crossed the room to the bookshelf door and swung it wide, revealing an old iron door that looked like it might go down to a cellar. “Go to Atlantic City and sit down at the poker tables—if you know exactly how the cards will fall, you’ll break every bastard in the room. Go to Wall Street—if you know how the markets will swing five months, ten months, ten years down the road—well. You’ll do pretty well for yourself, won’t you?”

“But that’s ... not possible, is it?” Martin said.

His father laughed and dug in the inside breast pocket of his tuxedo, producing a wrought-iron key. “It is very much possible, son. But I’m not talking about the kind of information that ordinary people—even your fancy Harvard mathematics whiz kids—could ever get their hands on.”

He put the key in the heavy lock and opened the forbidding door with some effort. “I know of exactly one source in the whole world for that kind of information, and you’re about to meet him.”

Martin followed his father down marble steps into a subterranean room lit with old-fashioned gaslight sconces. Near the door, there was an old oak table littered with various arcane-looking implements, but the room was completely dominated by what sat at the far end: a golden skeleton on some kind of throne. Even though the metal bones glittered, they also seemed to draw the light from the room.

“Meet the man John D. Rockefeller once said was the most skilled businessman he’d ever known,” Martin’s father said. “Or what his dusty corpse became, anyhow.”

“That’s Gould?” Martin asked, incredulous. “Jay Gould, the robber baron?”

Martin stepped closer to the precious revenant. Its skull had polished rubies in the eye sockets. The top of the cranium bore a threaded screw hole. There was a buildup of some kind of dried, tarry substance that, when liquid, had apparently spilled down from the foramen magnum over the spinal column and the ribs, staining a dark pool on the red velvet seat of the throne.

“Now, don’t call the old boy names,” his father said, a perverse smile playing on his face. “He still has feelings, you know.
Pride
, anyhow. Best to stay on his good side if you want his help. And believe me, son, you
do
want his help.”

“But ... how ....” A million questions were jostling in Martin’s head, and he found himself unable to articulate a single one of them.

“How, indeed,” his father said, looking tremendously amused at Martin’s confusion. “About fifteen years after Jay Gould died, your grandfather met a prospective business partner, a nephew of King Carol of Romania, who claimed to have a plan for generating great riches for them both. The pair of them broke into Gould’s mausoleum, replaced his remains with the corpse of a peasant, and smuggled Jay’s body out to a monastery in the Carpathians where the monks were known to be skilled in, well,
certain mysteries
. Once your grandfather acquired all the gold and jewels necessary for the ritual, the monks gilded and enchanted the skeleton as if it were a holy relic, summoning and binding Jay’s soul to the bones and giving it clairvoyance into all possible futures.

“When Jay’s skeleton was completed, the king’s nephew of course tried to double-cross your grandfather and have him murdered, but he was too tough and far too sly to fall for that kind of a trick. Your grandfather took the skeleton for himself, and hightailed back to the States. Old Jay’s been down here ever since.

“The throne was my idea,” his father continued. “Jay wasn’t too happy with your grandfather after a while, and so I got him the chair as sort of a peace offering when I took over. It belonged to King Louis XIV of France ... it’s not magic, but it is a very fine place to sit.”

“What’s that black stuff on the bones and seat?” Martin asked.

“Blood,” his father replied. “Even spirits need to eat. I can get an answer with, say, fresh chicken blood, but old Jay always did have a taste for human juice.”

Martin’s father leaned over the cluttered table and picked up a bronze funnel with a threaded tip, a bronze dish, and a very sharp-looking silver dagger. “I haven’t fed him in a while, so he’s sleeping now, but I might as well get you two introduced. Give me your hand, son ....”

Two guards flanked Martin as he carried his pack of linens and towels down the gray hall to the Secure Housing Unit. Most of the men crammed by twos and threes in the 8’x10’ cells were dressed in bright orange jumpsuits. At the far end was a cell occupied by one young, worried-looking man in the same tan clothing Martin had been issued. The young fellow’s skin was fair, but his broad nose and close-cropped curly hair spoke of a mixed ethnic ancestry. His solemn green eyes blinked behind thick glasses.

“Hey, any word on my paperwork?” the young man called out to the guards.

“No paperwork, but we brought you a new bunky,” one of the guards replied. They marched Martin up to the cell, unlocked it, and put him inside. “You boys play nice, y’hear?”

“Whoa.” The gangly young man’s eyes widened. “Are you Bennington?”

Martin set his stack of towels and linens on the small desk. “That I am.”

“Oh, wow, it’s an honor, sir ... I mean, the circumstances aren’t—look, you can take the bottom bunk, a man like you shouldn’t have to climb up on this rickety thing.”

“Thank you,” Martin said, unfolding one of the steel chairs and taking a seat. “But don’t worry about all that now. Tell me about yourself.”