A few miles past a camping exit, Janson saw a turnoff marked for the town of Castleton, and he knew that Millington would not be much farther. JED SIPPERLY’S PRE-OWNED AUTO—BUY YOUR NEXT CAR HERE! read a garish roadside sign. It was lettered with white and blue car-body paint on a metal plaque mounted high on a pole. Tear tracks of rust spilled from the corner rivets. Janson pulled into the lot.
It would be the second time he had changed cars en route; in Maryland he had picked up a late-model Altima from its owner. Switching vehicles was standard procedure during long trips. He was confident that he was not being followed, but there was always the possibility of “soft surveillance”: a purely passive system of observation, agents instructed to notice, not to follow. A young woman riding shotgun in a Dodge Ram whose eyes flickered from a newspaper to a license plate; the fat man with an overheated car stalled on the shoulder, the hood up, seemingly waiting for AAA. Almost certainly they were as innocent as they appeared, and yet there were no guarantees. Soft surveillance, though of limited effectiveness, was essentially undetectable. So at intervals, Janson changed his vehicle. If anyone was attempting to keep tabs on his movements, it would make a difficult task even more so.
A 120-pound dog lunged repeatedly at a heavygauge Cyclone fence as Janson got out of his Altima and made his way toward the low trailerlike office. ALL OFFERS CONSIDERED read a sign in the window. The large animal—he was a mongrel, whose ancestors seemed to include a pit bull and a Doberman, and possibly a mastiff—was penned into one corner of the lot and once more threw himself against the unyielding Cyclone fence. Aside from his size, the wretched mutt was a perfect contrast to the old crone’s noble whitecoated Kuvasz, Janson mused. But perhaps the animals were only as different as the masters they served.
A thirtyish man with a cigarette tucked into the corner of his mouth sauntered out of the trailer. He thrust out a hand toward Janson, a bit too abruptly. For a split instinctual second, Janson readied himself to deliver a crushing blow to his neck; then he reached out and clasped the man’s hand. It bothered him that those reflexes signaled themselves in perfectly civil contexts, but they were the same reflexes that had saved his life on countless occasions. Violence, when it appeared, so often was inappropriate, out of context. What mattered was that such impulses were under Janson’s control. He would not be leaving the younger man sprawled on the pavement, howling in pain. He would be leaving him pleased at an advantageous trade-in supplemented with a pocketful of cash.
“I’m Jed Sipperly,” the man said, with a showily firm handshake; somebody must have told him that a firm handshake inspired confidence. His face was fleshy but firm beneath a thatch of straw-colored hair; the sun had burned a ruddy crease that started near the bridge of his nose and curved beneath his eyes. Perhaps it was because he had driven for too many hours straight, but Janson suddenly had a vision of what the salesman would look like in a few decades. The meaty lips and padded cheeks would grow loose; the sunexposed contours of his face would turn into furrows, ravines. What now passed for healthy ruddiness would coarsen into a webbing of capillaries, like crosshatchings on an engraving. The yellow hair would whiten and retrench to a zone around his nape and temples, the usual follicular fallback.
On the fake-wood table in the shadowed office, Janson could make out an open brown Budweiser bottle and a nearly full ashtray. These things, too, would speed the transformation, doubtless already had started to.
“Now, what kin I do you for?” Jed’s breath was faintly beery, and as he stepped closer, the sun picked out his crow’s-feet.
There was another cage-rattling lunge from the dog.
“Don’t you mind Butch,” the man said. “I think he enjoys it. You excuse me for a moment?” Jed Sipperly walked outside to the pavement near the chain-link enclosure and stooped down to pick up a small Raggedy Ann–style cloth doll. He tossed it into the enclosed area. It turned out to be what the mammoth dog was pining for: he bounded over to it, and began to cradle it between huge paws. With a few laps of his floppy pink tongue he cleaned the dust from the rag doll’s button-and-yarn features.
Jed returned to his customer with an apologetic shrug. “Look at him slobber on it—dog’s so attached to that doll, it ain’t wholesome,” he said. “I guess everybody’s got a somebody. A real good guard dog, ’cept he won’t bark. Which is sometimes a saving grace.” A professional smile: his lips curved up in an isolated movement; the eyes remained watchful and without warmth. It was the kind of smile that bureaucrats shared with shopkeepers. “That your Nissan Altima?”
“Thinking of a trade,” Janson said.
Jed looked slightly pained, a merchant asked to give to charity. “We get a lot of those cars. I like ’em. Got a weakness for ’em. Be my undoing. Lots of people don’t particularly care for those Japan cars, especially hereabouts. How many miles you got on it?”
“Fifty thou,” Janson said. “A little more.”
Another wince. “Good time for a trade, then. Because those Nissan transmissions start making trouble once you reach sixty. Give you that for nothing. Anybody’ll tell you the same thing.”
“Thanks for the tip,” Janson said, nodding at the patent lies of a used-car salesman. There was something almost endearing about the spirited way he upheld the stereotype of his trade.
“I personally like ’em, mechanical troubles and all. Like the look of ’em, somehow. And repairs ain’t a problem for me, because we’ve got a repair guy on call. If what you’re looking for is reliability, though, I can steer you toward one or two models that’ll probably outlast you.” He pointed toward a maroon sedan. “See that Taurus? One of the all-time greats. Runs perfect. Some of the later models all loaded up with special features you never use. More useless features, more stuff to go wrong. This one, it’s fully automatic, you got your radio, your A/C, and you’re good to go. Change the oil every three thousand miles, gas up with regular unleaded, and you’re laughin’. My friend, you are laughin’.”
Janson looked grateful as the salesman fleeced him, taking the late-model Altima in trade for the aging Taurus and asking for an additional four hundred dollars on top. “A sweet deal,” Jed Sipperly assured him. “I just have a weakness for an Altima, kinda like Butch and his Raggedy Ann. It’s irrational, but love’s not a thing to reason about, is it? You come in with one of those, of course I’m gonna let you waltz off with the nicest car on the lot. And anybody else would say, ‘Jed, you’re crazy. That piece of Jap tin ain’t worth the hubcap on that Taurus.’ Well, maybe it is crazy.” An exaggerated wink: “Let’s do this deal before I change my mind. Or sober up!”
“Appreciate your candor,” Janson said.
“Tell you what,” the salesman said, signing a receipt with a flourish, “you give me another fiver and you can have the damn dog in with it!” A long-suffering laugh: “Or maybe I should pay you to take it off my hands.”
Janson smiled, waved, and as he got into the seven-year-old Taurus, heard the sibilant hiss of another screwtop Budweiser being opened—this time in celebration.
The doubts Janson had as he traveled intensified upon his arrival. The area around Millington was down-and-out, struggling and charmless. It simply did not feel like an area that a billionaire would have chosen for a country retreat.
There were other towns—like Little Washington, off 211, farther north—where the soul-destroying work of entertaining tourists had overtaken whatever local economy had been left. Those were museum towns, in effect—towns whose white shingled barns were crammed with doubly marked-up Colonial Homestead china and “authentic” milk-glass saltshakers and “regional” beeswax candles crated in from a factory in Trenton. Farms were converted into overpriced eateries ; daughters of woodworkers and pipefitters and farmers—those who sought to stay, anyway—laced themselves into frilly “colonial”-style costumes and practiced saying, “My name is Linda and I’ll be your waitress this evening.” The locals greeted visitors with manufactured warmth and the wide smile of avarice.
What kin ah do you for?
That green tide of tourism had never reached Millington. It didn’t take Janson long to size up the place. Though scarcely more than a village, it was somehow too real to be picturesque. Perched on a rocky slope of Smith Mountain, it regarded the natural world as something to be overcome, not packaged and sold for its aesthetic value. There were no bed-and-breakfasts in the vicinity. The nearest motels were utilitarian, boxy affiliates of downscale national chains, run by hardworking immigrants from the Indian subcontinent : they did just fine by truck drivers who wanted to crash for the night, but had little appeal for businessmen in search of “conference center” facilities. It was a town that was dark by ten o’clock, at which point the only lights you could see came from dozens of miles down the valley, where the town of Montvale sparkled like a flashy, decadent metropolis. The biggest single employer was a former paper plant that now produced glazed bricks and did a side business in unrefined mineral byproducts; about a dozen men spent their working hours bagging potash. A smaller factory, a little farther out, specialized in decorative millwork. The downtown diner, at Main and Pemberton Streets, served eggs and home fries and coffee all day, and if you ordered all three, you got a free tomato or orange juice on the side, though it arrived in something little bigger than a shot glass. The gas station had an attached “foodmart” with racks of the same cellophane-wrapped snacks available everywhere else on the U.S. roadways. The mustard in the local grocery store came in two varieties, French’s yellow or Gulden’s brown: nothing coarse-grained or tarragon-infused burdened the condiment section of the chipped enameled shelves, no moutarde au poivre vert within township limits. Janson’s kind of place.
Yet if the decades-old accounts were accurate, there was a vast estate hidden somewhere in the hills, as private a residence as you could hope for—legally as well as physically. For even its ownership was completely obscure. Was it really conceivable that “Novak”—the mirage who called himself that—was nearby? Janson’s scalp tightened as he mulled the possibilities.
Later that morning, Janson entered the diner at the corner of Main and Pemberton, where he started a conversation with the counterman. The counterman’s sloping forehead, close-set eyes, and jutting, square jaw gave him a slightly simian appearance, but when he spoke, he proved surprisingly knowledgeable.
“So you’re thinking of moving nearby?” The counterman splashed more coffee into Janson’s cup from his Silex pot. “Let me guess. Made your money in the big city and now you want the peace and quiet of the country, that it?”
“Something like that,” Janson said. Nailed to the wall behind the counter was a sign, white cursive lettering on black: Kenny’s Coffee Shoppe—Where Quality & Service Rule.
“Sure you don’t want someplace a little nearer to your high-class conveniences? There’s a Realtor lady on Pemberton, but I’m not sure you’ll find exactly the kind of house you’re looking for around here.”
“Thinking of building,” Janson said. The coffee was acrid, having sat on the hot pad too long. He gazed absently at the Formica-topped counter, its pattern of loosewoven cloth worn to white in the middle of the counter, where the traffic of heavy plates and cutlery was heaviest.
“Sounds like fun. If’n you can afford to do something nice.” The man’s drugstore aftershave mingled unpleasantly with the heavy aroma of lard and butter.
“No point otherwise.”
“Nope, no point otherwise,” the counterman agreed. “My boy, you know, he had some dang-fool way he was going to get rich. Some dot-com thing. Was going to middleman some e-commerce gimcrackery. For months he was talking about his ‘business model,’ and ‘added value,’ and ‘frictionless e-commerce,’ and flapdoodle like that. Said the thing about the New Economy was the ‘death of distance’ so that it didn’t make no difference where you was. We was all just nodes on the World Wide Web, didn’t matter whether you was in Millington or Roanoke or the goddamn Dulles corridor. He and a couple of friends from high school, it was. Burned through whatever was in their piggy banks by December, was back to shoveling driveways by January. What my wife calls a cautionary tale. She said, just be happy he wuddn’t on drugs. I told her I wuddn’t so sure about that. Not every drug is something you smoke, sniff, or shoot up. Money, or the craving for it, can be a drug just as surely.”
“Getting money is one trick, spending it’s another,” Janson said. “Possible to build around here?”
“Possible to build on the moon, people say.”
“What about transportation.”
“Well, you’re here, ain’t you?”
“I guess I am.”
“Roads here are in pretty good repair.” The counterman’s eyes were on a spectacle across the street. A young blond woman was washing the sidewalk in front of a hardware store; as she bent over, her cutoffs hitched a little higher up her thigh. No doubt the highlight of his day.
“Airport?” Janson asked.
“Nearest real airport’s probably Roanoke.”
Janson took a sip of coffee. It coated his tongue like oil. “‘Real’ airport? There another kind around here?”
“Naw. Well. There used to be, back in the forties and fifties. Some sort of tiny airport that the Army Air Force built. About three miles up Clangerton Road, a turnoff to the left. The idea is they were training pilots how to maneuver around the mountains in Romania, on the way to bombing the oil fields. So they did some practice flights hereabouts. Later on, some of the lumber guys used it for a while, but the lumber industry pretty near died off. I don’t think it’s much more than an airstrip anymore. You don’t fly masonry if you can avoid it—you truck it.”
“So what happened to that airstrip? Ever get used?”
“Ever? Never? I don’t use those words.” His gaze did not leave the blonde in the short cutoffs washing the sidewalk across the street.
“Reason I ask, you see, is an old business associate of mine, he lives near here, and said something about it.”
The counterman looked uncomfortable. Janson pushed his empty coffee cup forward to be refilled, and the man pointedly did not do so. “Then you’d better ask him about it, hadn’t you?” the man said, and his gaze returned to the vision of unattainable paradise across the street.
“Seems to me,” Janson said, tucking a few bills beneath his saucer, “that you and your son both have an eye for the bottom line.”
The town grocery store was just down the street. Janson stopped in and introduced himself to the manager, a bland-looking man with light brown hair in a modified mullet. Janson told him what he had told the man at the diner. The store manager evidently found the prospect of a new arrival lucrative enough that he was downright encouraging.
“That is a great idea, man,” he said. “These hills—I mean, it’s really beautiful here. And you get a few miles up the mountain and look around and it’s totally unspoiled. Plus you got your hunting and your fishing and your …” He trailed off, seemingly unable to think of a third suitable item. He wasn’t sure this man would be a regular at the bowling alley or take much interest in the video arcade recently installed next to the check-cashing joint. Safe bet they had those things in the cities, too.
“And for everyday stuff?” Janson prodded.
“We got a video store,” he volunteered. “Laundromat. This store right here. I can do special orders, if you need ’em. Do that once in a while for regular customers.”
“Have you, now?”
“Oh yeah. We got all kinds around here. There’s one cat—we’ve never seen him, but he sends a guy down here every few days to pick up groceries. Super-rich—gotta be. Owns a place somewhere up in the mountains, some kind of Lex Luthor hideaway, I like to think. People see a little plane touching down near there most every afternoon. But he still uses us for groceries. Ain’t that a way to live? Get somebody else to do your shopping!”
“And you do special orders for this guy?”
“Oh for sure,” the man said. “It’s all real, re
al secure. Maybe he’s Howard Hughes, afraid somebody going to poison him.” He chuckled at the thought. “Whatever he wants, it’s not a problem. I order it and a Sysco truck comes by and delivers it, and he has a guy come get it, he don’t care what it costs.”
“That right?”
“You bet. So, like I say, I’m happy to special-order whatever you like. And Mike Nugent at the video store, he’ll do the same for you. It’s not a problem. You’re going to have a great time here. No place like it. Some of the kids can get a little rowdy. But basically it’s as friendly as all get-out. You’re gonna have a great time here once you settle in. My bet? You’re never gonna leave.”
A gray-haired woman at the refrigerated section was calling to him. “Keith? Keith, dear?”
The man excused himself, and went over to her.
“Is this sole fresh or frozen?” she was asking.
“It’s fresh frozen,” Keith explained.
As the two carried on an earnest conversation about whether the designation signified a way of being fresh or a way of being frozen, Janson wandered over to the far end of the grocery store. The stockroom door was open, and he stepped into it, casually. At a small metal desk was a stack of pale blue Sysco inventory lists. He flipped through them quickly until he reached one stamped SPECIAL ORDER. Toward the bottom of a long row of foodstuffs in small print, he saw a bold check, from the grocer’s Sharpie marker. An order of buckwheat groats.