The Sleepless (49 page)

He sat up. He reached over and fumbled in his trouser pocket for his handkerchief. Gently, he wiped Megan’s face; and then he kissed her again. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m really sorry.’ 

‘Why are you sorry? You did what you felt like doing. It wasn’t love.’ 

‘I’m sorry because I like you. I’m sorry because you’re Thomas’s wife. I’m sorry because I’m Patsy’s husband.’ 

‘Will you help me back into my chair?’ she asked him. 

He buttoned up her blouse, and rearranged her panties, and brushed down her skirt. Then he picked her up in his arms, and sat her back in her wheelchair. 

‘It was him,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t you, and it wasn’t me. It was him. He was showing us what our sins are.’ 

‘I still don’t understand.’ 

He reached down to pick up his trousers, but Megan said, ‘No ... before you dress, come here.’ 

Naked, he approached her, and stood in front of her. She lifted her hand, and took hold of his softening penis, rubbing her thumb around the glans, and gently massaging the shaft. 

‘This will never happen to me again,’ she said. ‘I’m not an adulteress; and I know that you’re not an adulterer.’ Her eyes sparkled with tears. ‘It wasn’t us, it was him, and he was sinful. But I don’t regret it. I can’t. You made me feel whole. For the first time since my accident happened, you made me feel whole.’ 

Michael leaned over and kissed her forehead. ‘I’d better go now. There’s a whole lot more for me to do.’ 

Neither of them noticed it, but a faint pinkish flicker of light passed between them, as one aura reluctantly disentangled itself from the other. What they both felt, as Michael slowly dressed himself, and combed his hair, was a distinct sense of loss, and separation. 

Michael picked up the zinc-and-copper disc. He was about to slip it into his pocket, but then he put it back down on the table. 

‘Souvenir,’ he said, and left, closing the door very quietly behind him. 

He was manoeuvering his big green Mercury out of the sloping entrance-way in front of Thomas and Megan’s apartment when he noticed three white-faced young men in dark glasses, watching him the opposite side of the street. He stopped the car, and trod on the parking-brake. 

Instantly, an Italian-looking man in a blue cotton coat came hurrying out of the building, and furiously rapped on his window. Mr Novato, the super mat Thomas loved to hate. 

‘Something wrong?’ Michael asked him. 

‘You can’t stop here, sir, this is a private driveway.’ 

‘I’m not stopped here; I’m about to leave.’ 

‘So, leave.’ 

‘I would have left by now if you hadn’t stopped me.’ 

The man lifted one finger, pointing upward to the apartment block. ‘You been visiting?’ 

‘That’s right, I’ve been visiting. I’m a friend of Lieutenant Boyle, if you must know.’ 

‘Well, that’s-a one sad man.’ 

‘Who? Who are you talking about? Lieutenant Boyle?’ 

‘That’s right, that’s-a one sad man.’ 

‘Listen, friend, you may be the super here, or whatever, but I’m not going to discuss Lieutenant Boyle’s personal feelings with you or anybody.’ 

‘Who wouldn’t be sad? His wife so sick. Can’t walk, can’t go shopping, can’t do nothing.’ 

Michael turned away, and took a deep breath. Then he turned back and said, ‘Lieutenant Boyle is very far from sad, I can tell you. And I can tell you something else: Mrs Boyle is worth a hundred of most women that I can think of.’ 

Mr Novato stared at him beadily. ‘Hey ... sorry I spoke. No offence meant.’ 

He retreated, and watched Michael back out of the sloping driveway with an angry little squeal of tyres. Before he drove off, Michael glanced back across the street, to the entrance-way where the three white-faced young men had been watching him, but now they were gone. It was quite possible that he had imagined them – especially after that Aura Hypnosis with Megan. 

On the other hand, it was equally possible that they were following him, and that they intended to deal with him in the same way that they had dealt with Joe. 

He drove south on Margin Street, crowded and slow, and then west on Copper. The car radio was playing ‘Happy Together’ by the Turtles.
Imagine me and you, I do, I think about you day and night.
 

Jesus Christ, what had he done to his honour? What had he done to his marriage? 

He stopped to let a man in dark glasses cross the street, thinking that he was blind. The man had almost reached the opposite kerb when he raised his dark glasses in salute, and smiled. 

Marcia was hyperactive. Her face was puffy and her hair was all flat at the back. She probably hadn’t sat down once since the Barnstable County deputies had brought her the news that Joe had been discovered in the woods north of 151, stripped and assaulted, and dead of a massive cardiac arrest. 

She talked as if he were still alive. She didn’t exactly say ‘when Joe gets back’ in so many words, but everything she said carried the implication that the Barnstable County Sheriff’s Department had made an ugly and painful mistake, and that when Joe did get back, well, heads would probably roll. 

Michael sat in the living-room with a cup of cappuccino that he didn’t want to drink, while Marcia stalked from room to room, talking, arguing, protesting. She had only to stop for a minute and she would have to accept the fact that Joe was dead, and she wasn’t ready to do that yet. It was hard enough for Michael to accept it. There were photographs of Joe everywhere he looked. On top of the television, on top of the fireplace. Even when he used the bathroom, there was a photograph of Joe in a yellow wet-suit, lifting up a spider-crab for him to admire. 

‘I told him not to get involved,’ said Marcia. 

‘You told him not to get involved in what?’ 

‘This conspiracy business. He didn’t talk about it much, but I could tell that he was worried.’ 

‘What did he tell you about it?’ 

Marcia shook her head. ‘Hardly anything. Nothing. He said it was safer if I didn’t know. I tried to persuade him to forget about it. I’ll bet you that none of it’s true, that’s what I told him. But even if it isn’t, you’ll still get people coming after you, because they’re worried that it might be true, so leave well enough alone.’ 

‘I’m sorry,’ said Michael. ‘I don’t know what else to say.’ 

Marcia stopped pacing for a moment, and then she said, ‘He didn’t leave you anything, if that’s what you’re thinking.’ 

‘I wasn’t.’ 

‘There’s an envelope, but that’s all.’ 

‘An envelope? Do you mind if I see it?’ 

‘Oh ... sure.’ Marcia disappeared into the room that Joe had used as a den, and then reappeared two or three minutes later with a thick legal-sized envelope. On the front, in Joe’s writing, were the words
For Michael Rearden. Only To Be Opened In The Event Of My Sudden Death.
 

Michael tore open the envelope and took out the letter. ‘This is dated two years ago,’ he said, in surprise. 

‘That was when Joe first came up with this conspiracy theory,’ said Marcia. ‘Ever since then, life has been very much less harmonious. God – I wish he’d been a streetsweeper, or a school janitor, or an auto mechanic. Why didn’t he stick to ordinary, run-of-the-mill insurance investigations? Why did he think that he was going to change the world?’ 

Michael closed his ears to Marcia Garboden for a moment. He knew how she felt, but she wasn’t helping any. Besides, he was trying to make sense of the contents of the letter that Joe had left him. There was a sheet of notepaper, bearing nothing but a typewritten series of names and numbers, with no explanatory notes whatsoever; and then there were twenty or thirty photocopies of engravings and photographs, mostly photographs. 

The names and numbers were: ‘Lincoln 65 Alexander 81 Garfield 81 Umberto 00 McKinley 01 Madero 13 George 13 Ferdinand 14 Michael 18 Nicholas 18 Carranza 20 Collins 22 Villa 23 Obregon 28 Cermak 33 Dollfuss 34 Long 35 Bronstein 40 Gandhi 48 Bernadotte 48 Hussein 51 Somoza 56 Armas 57 FaisaL 58 as-Said 58 Bandaranaike 59 Lumumba 61 Molina 61 Evers 63 Diem 63 Mansour 65 X 65 Verwoerd 66 King 68 Tal 71 NoeL 73 Park 74 Davies 74 Ratsimandrava 75 Faisal 75 Rahman 75 Ramat Moham-med 76 Jumblat 77 Ngoubai 77 Al-Naif 78 Dubs 79 Neave 79 Mountbatten 79 Park 79 Tolbert 80 Debayle 80 Ali Raji 81 El-Sadat 81 Gemayel 82 Sartawi 83 Aquino 83 Gandhi 84 ... ‘ 

It took him a minute or two, but gradually Michael began to understand what the letter was trying to tell him. Every name was the name of an assassinated politician or dignitary or head of state, and the numbers signified the years in which they had been killed. 

Then he looked through the photographs. Every one of them was a photograph of the assassination or the funeral of one of the people on the list, or the execution of their assassins. In every one of them, two or three white-faced bystanders had been circled by Joe in red felt-tip pen. 

Here was the hanging on July 7, 1865, of John Wilkes Booth’s accomplices, after the assassination of Lincoln. Mrs Mary Surratt, David Herrold, Lewis Paine and George Atzerodt hung from the scaffold, their heads covered in sacks, their legs tied together to prevent them from kicking. And there, shielding themselves from the sunlight under large umbrellas, were two of the white-faced men, wearing tiny smoked spectacles, both smiling. 

Here was Charles J. Guiteau, who shot President Garfield at the Washington railroad station, arriving handcuffed for his trial on November 14, 1881 – with three white-faced men standing in the crowd, just behind his left shoulder. 

Here was the shooting of Egyptian President Anwar El-Sadat on October 6, 1981, at a military parade in Cairo. Most of the spectators were hiding under their seats – but a single white-faced man is watching President El-Sadat’s shooting from the far left of the picture, with a faint smile on his face. 

Michael asked, ‘May I?’ and spread out the pictures on Marcia’s dining-table. He looked from one to the other – and although they varied in quality, and some of them had obviously been computer-enhanced, there was no question at all that the same men appeared again and again, unchanged in appearance, from Lincoln’s shooting at Ford’s Theater in Washington to the killing of Rajiv Gandhi at a political rally in southern India – over 125 years between them. With nothing but names and dates and identifying circles, Joe was giving Michael incontrovertible proof that the white-faced men had been assassinating politicians and heads of state for year after year – regardless of their political points of view. 

Some victims were right-wing extremists. Others were left-wing terrorists. There was no political rhyme or reason behind their killing. But Joe was explaining that John F. Kennedy hadn’t been the only victim of the white-faced men. They had arranged for all of these assassinations. 

Michael stood back and stared at the pictures, so deep in thought that he didn’t even hear Marcia when she asked him if he wanted a drink. 

What the hell was he going to do now? There was no question at all that the white-faced men would come after him, if they found out what he knew – the same way that they had gone after Joe, and Dr Rice, and maybe everybody throughout history who had witnessed one of their assassinations, or who had put two and two together, like Joe, and realized that the same pallid faces kept appearing about a hundred times too often to be coincidental. 

He was seized with such fear and indecision that he could scarcely breathe. This was more than he could handle. Because who could he turn to? Who could he trust? Not the police. Commissioner Hudson had accepted Dr Moorpath’s blatantly spurious autopsy on John O’Brien ‘with whole-hearted thanks for a difficult job, sensitively carried out’. He couldn’t go to the media, either, because they seemed to have accepted the autopsy, too, without a single investigative murmur – even the
Boston Globe,
even Darlene McCarthy on Channel 56. 

He couldn’t go to Edgar Bedford. After all, Joe had suspected for years now that Edgar Bedford was deeply involved with the white-faced men. What was even more threatening was the way in which Edgar Bedford had accepted Dr Moorpath’s autopsy, too, regardless of the fact that it was going to cost Plymouth and its underwriters tens of millions of dollars. 

He thought he could trust Thomas Boyle, although he was lacerated with guilt about what he had done to Megan. Pray God that Thomas never found out. And Victor – he could trust Victor, for sure. 

Slowly, he collected the photographs together, and slid them back into their envelope. Perhaps, more than anything, he hoped that he could trust himself. 

Fifteen 

He met Victor and Thomas at Venus Seafood in the Rough, the clamshack on Sleeper Street close to the Northern Avenue Bridge, because Thomas knew Susan Chused-Still, one of the restaurant’s partners, or self-appointed ‘clam queens’. Victor and Thomas had obviously been disturbed by the morning’s events, but they were hungry, too, and ordered fried clams and corn-on-the-cob. 

Michael had no appetite at all, and found it very difficult to look Thomas in the eye. He kept thinking about Megan, sliding herself down from her wheelchair, dragging up her skirt, her eyes alight with a lust that wasn’t even hers. He toyed with a beer, and ate a few handfuls of smoked almonds, but that was all.