Woke Up Lonely (33 page)

No traffic, no people, herewith: Cincinnati. The river blue, molared with ice, the wind patrolling the city street by street; this place was bleak like Pyongyang but without the excuse, which meant it was actually bleaker. They rolled through downtown and then doubled back, and in the way you can sense a water mass well before you see it, so it is with the ambience of a crisis in play. Sirens and floodlights might beacon the news, but it’s the sublimated chaos—chaos in hand—that radiates for miles.

A tony neighborhood. Mansions. Many architectural dogmas in effect. Tudors, castles, Victorians, and there, up a hill, the stone square presidio Thurlow Dan called home.

The cordon site was like a fern whose pot was entirely too small. It had proliferated well beyond the road—a two-way lane, but barely—up neighboring lawns, and into a Tudor opposite the Helix House, whose family had been moved to the Marriot and given plane tickets to Puerto Rico in thanks. On scene: special ops, National Guard, local police, Men in Charge. Women, too, but no matter, just people whose job was to revise, at a clip, how best to storm the castle.

The road was a gauntlet of authority vehicles. Paper cups in the gutter, caskets of four-way chili swept curbside. Two loudspeakers rigged to gaslights. A pumper truck with coffee on the grill; three ambulances up a lawn and the rest parked at a golf course nearby.

There was no way to drive through this mess, so they had to park and wend, which was no picnic. Noah had Esme’s arm in a pinch. Ida refused to take her hand, so Esme tried to keep her one step ahead, which meant treading her heels and getting nasty looks for it. It was freezing, and since no one knew how to talk to one another despite the headgear and mics and direct connect, they got stopped every two feet.

At first Noah just flashed his badge and passed them through, but as they got closer, and the barring command got more imposing, the badge no longer cut it. What was needed at this point was a badge plus an extraordinarily compelling reason to bother the assistant special agent in charge—so what, exactly, was their business here?

“It’s the ex-wife,” Noah said. “That good enough?”

He said it loud; there was no way Ida had missed it. And so, there it was. Esme died a thousand times over. And based on the Moses part that opened up before them, the information must have struck the ops with similar intensity, likewise the news choppers overhead, which nearly clipped each other for best vantage of the freedom given this mother and child. Who were they that the way was clear?

Not that Esme had moved. To have had the work of disclosure done for her, without fuss or warning—she was exhilarated and traumatized, though both fell short of the flowered comprehension in her daughter’s face, upturned and saying with unmistakable clarity: Yep, now is the moment when the tropism of my attachments could go this way or that. Now is your chance to shine on me the torch you’ve been carrying for my dad, and we can be a family whether we get to him or not.

Esme knelt so they were eye level. She didn’t know where to begin. But Ida had it figured out; she turned away and headed straight for the Helix House.

Ran
for the house, so that when a cop scooped her up, it was a tantrum like no other. She bit his arm. Drew blood. Esme did not expect her to listen, but she said, “Sweetie, stop, I’ll explain everything, I swear,” and like that, Ida was calm. She walked back and pressed her whole body into Esme like she was the dunce and Mom was the corner. It was Ida’s first kindness in days and maybe her first ever apropos the labor of forgiving your parents, and so when she whispered, having pulled her mom in close, “Can you help Dad?” Esme didn’t have it in her to say no.

The special agent in charge came out the Tactical Operations Center to greet them and share the latest: You took too long. The feds are done talking. They were done hours ago, but now they are
really
done. Thurlow’s dad was back in the house against orders, Norman had cut off all communication, the hostages were probably still in the den, there were guards straggled throughout the compound, and unless Esme had a better idea, it was T minus five.

The team had set up in the living room of the Tudor house across the street. Persian rug, mahogany hutch, and, above the fireplace, a mantel of framed days in the life of the family displaced by this operation. Kid in Little League, missing teeth. Kid in hockey helmet, missing teeth. Girl plus trophy held high. And it wasn’t that these photos had seized for posterity special moments in time so much as the feeling inspired by these moments: You are a marvel, you are forever.

Esme looked at Ida, who sat recessed in a loveseat, hands in a clump between her legs, chin to chest. And without warning, it happened: Esme felt the right thing at exactly the right time.

She had compulsions, hangups, fear, but she also had clarity. Her parents were dead. Her brother had died with her name behind it. She and Ida had no one left; they barely had each other. But what they did have with Thurlow was a dynamic, and in this arrangement of lives vectored to and from each other, whole universes were given home. Isn’t that what people mean when they talk about family? The unspoken, unseen, but eminently felt?

She told the SAC that she did have a better idea, yes. And after she laid it out, he extended his arms as though readying for a catch. She could see his palms—the skin was thick and dense like beeswax—and understood anew the expression
The whole world in his hands.

The math was easy. Risk Esme, who was trained and largely responsible for this situation, or risk the hostages, because, without credible intel, anyone caught with so much as a hot dog in hand would get shot. If Esme got taken or hurt, HRT was going to assault the compound anyway; if she could end this thing without bloodshed, all the better, job well done.

The SAC said: “If you’re not out in ten, we won’t wait.” Esme understood. She asked for a second with Ida, but when they went to the other room, she didn’t have to tell her much. Ida was on board—she was brave, a natural—and fleeing the house within five minutes of the bustle grown up around Esme as they fit her with a camera. Her plan? To rendezvous with Ida at Reading and McMillan, at a manhole the city opened last week. Ida would find it easily—just walk south and walk fast, and if Esme wasn’t there in an hour, call Martin.

At last, Esme was in the Helix House. In the first-floor pantry, where hostages might have been but weren’t. Same for the den and the other rooms. Her team of four was gone. Unclear where, though she suspected they were scattered throughout the underground of Cincinnati. No problem; she’d pick them up later. In any case, they were not here, and that was good, and Wayne agreed. She’d found him toting his wife and bird down the hall. Under the circumstances, he should have been pleased to see her, but no, the look on his face was all hate. He said no one else was left in the house but Thurlow, and then he kept walking.

Esme knew she had to get to Thurlow ASAP, but instead she dwelled on the stuff around her. The pens he’d held. The pillows he’d touched. She disconnected her headcam. So long as SWAT thought the place was rigged and manned, they had time. Ten minutes wasn’t much, but it would do. That, a few cans of gas, accelerant, and a lighter.

She paused outside Thurlow’s door and rested her hand on the knob. They had been happy once. Since then it had been x days, months, years, and she still missed him with a degree of agony that would have sent most people running back to him a long time ago. But not Esme. Instead, she had ignored the need, boxed it up, put it away, acquired new experiences to box and pile until her tower had grown nine thousand boxes high and there was no chance she could feel that first box on the bottom, right? Princess and the pea. Such a deranged moral to offer a child. The more sensitive you are to pain welled deep in your psyche, the more noble your spirit? It was better to be noble than happy? She pressed her ear to the wood. And the weeping she heard inside needed no interpretation. It’s true that when your subject weeps and so do you, it is hard to tell your hurt from his. For a person who listens, rare are the moments you don’t have to.

VI. In which: A masquerade down the coast of North Korea. The missing on our lips. Order in the House. Tedium.

VI. In which: A masquerade down the coast of North Korea. The missing on our lips. Order in the House. Tedium.

THEY
WERE
TOGETHER. It was a party. Left, right, red, blue, let’s examine this with love, and on network TV, too. In the house, the House of Representatives: the makings of a scandal, a probing of the facts.

421 Rayburn, Washington, D.C. Oak and silk and fleurs-de-lis.

The chairman and his statement. Thanks to you and you and you. Today is momentous. It is about accountability and oversight and truth, but in human terms, it’s about everyone we are missing. Four Department of the Interior employees. One cult leader. One ex-wife. Our key players have disappeared, and here we are, holding the bag. Among developments of equal sensation, there has been OJ in his truck, Rodney King, and Columbine, but for analogue to the hopes and dreams of the masses bound up in the fate of a few, we have on heart Baby Jessica’s two-day ordeal at the bottom of her uncle’s well in Midland, Texas. The organizing sentiment back then? If she is okay,
we’ll
be okay. Everyone just wanting to be okay. So, okay, order in the House. Let’s get this hearing under way.

First up: guys who wore their suits half assed and hair askew. One psychologist in the House—his glasses were sloped like a ray of light come down through the panes.

He was here to testify on behalf of the mind and what it does in the aftermath of trauma, for instance, what it might do to the four hostages should they ever be found. What is memory. Flashback. PTSD. Will they sue? This was what the representative from North Dakota wanted to know, though he padded the question with so much blarney, it seemed he was asking the shrink whether the emotional dissipation of a cult leader was cause enough to burn his house down. Because that’s what happened, right? The feds burned his house down? No? It was burned from the inside? Whatever.

It was time for the Ph.D. He had come with case studies of kidnapees past and of renown, and miscellaneous data that summed in template how the sundering of people from their lives could pan out in the long run.

Patti Hearst, scion. Kyoko Chan, scion. Frank Sinatra Jr., Charles Lindbergh Jr., John Paul Getty III, Adolph Coors III. Shergar, champion racehorse. Shin Sang-ok, South Korean director. Johnny Gosch, sold as catamite or fate unknown. Colleen Stan, locked in a box. Victor Li Tzarkuoi, ransomed for $134 million. Muriel McKay, mistaken for Rupert Murdoch’s wife and abducted from the sleepy village of Wimbledon, in which tennis legends are made but successful kidnappings are not. The Born brothers. Terry Leonhardy, Foreign Service officer, died of heart disease at age eighty-eight, kidnapped twenty years before in Mexico City. Terry Waite, hostage negotiator, who was nabbed in Beirut and kept in solitary confinement for four years. Terry Anderson, pinched by Hezbollah and jailed for six years alongside several Americans, including one Edward Tracey, everywhere referred to only as an “itinerant poet,” which has struck the Ph.D. as odd. Also worth noting: first name Terry does not correlate positively to an increased chance of abduction, witness homophones Teri Garr and Terri Schiavo, whose degenerative neurological problems, now that he thinks on it, do suggest something accursed in the name, prospective parents beware. (Terry Southern, crestfallen artist steeped in drug abuse, alcoholism, and financial insecurity; Terry Gilliam—no, wait, Terry Gilliam is God.)

There is no more welcoming venue for peroration and longueur than a congressional hearing, but still the chairman exhorted the doctor to get to the point—What is your point?—as the doc drummed his fingers on the table, thinking: My point? Kidnapping is part of the national consciousness. Should I move on?

Oh please, yes, move on.

The doctor said: Among postings online about kidnappers at large and lionized by his people is one about North Korean potentate Kim Jong-il.

But he was stopped there.

Mr. Chairman, I gather the good doctor is trying to get it on record that the Helix and Kim Jong-il are in bed together, and I want it known this is balderdash.

Mr. Chairman, unless I am dotty, I don’t think the doctor was claiming kin between North Korea and the Helix, but that it’s actually my good friend from Massachusetts who is trying to get this absurd rumor on record, which is an affront to the comity of these proceedings and also the intelligence of the American people watching and—

Another motion on the table. Procedural squabbles. Mutual yielding for the sake of getting finished before the next ice age. Objections for the record. Objection to the objections, also for the record.

The chairman took a long drink of water and called for order. But his mind was elsewhere. He was thinking that in a different life, he might have been Helix, too. Thurlow Dan was probably a nut, but couldn’t a nut still be spokesman for that anguished and desolate feeling you had every morning just for waking up alive?

It was time for a witness. Vicki swore to tell the truth, hand on the Bible, though she gave her right hand, much to the merriment of all who noticed, all but Vicki, because, what, a hooker was so lost to virtue she didn’t know about God and swearing? She’d just forgotten, is all.

She took her seat. At first she’d been cowed by the pomp adhering to her part in this. A car and driver, plus a suite at the Mayflower Hotel. She’d done her best to look right. Wore a cream skirt suit in defiance of the season. Fussed with her hair, trying to tamp down a spike in the front with wax putty and clip. Traded the black enamel of her nails for sunset pink, deracinated the studs from either cheek, and plugged the holes with that face powder Thurlow had given her. For all its claim to a natural provenance, it was still going to infect the shit out of her puncture wounds—like they were ever going to heal—but she’d done this just the same because it was Capitol Hill and a big fancy hearing, plus her parents would be watching from their convalescence home, she knew it.