Life Expectancy

  suppose if that was really a time machine, it would be.”

  “Nobody saw the need. To all appearances, it’s not a major bank, not worth knocking over. Besides, after 1902, when they sealed off the underground approach, there wasn’t a back entrance anymore. And in respect of the bank’s security, the charitable trust that owns the Snow Mansion agreed not to disclose Cornelius’s tunnels. A few people in the historical society have seen them, but only after signing a nondisclosure agreement with teeth.”

  Earlier he had mentioned torturing a member of the historical society, who was no doubt now as dead as the librarian. No matter how tightly a lawyer constructs a nondisclosure clause, there are ways around it.

  I won’t say that I was thunderstruck by these revelations, but I was certainly flabbergasted, however fine a point that might be. Although born and raised in Snow Village, and although I loved my picturesque hometown and was steeped in its history, I’d never heard so much as a rumor about secret passageways under the town square.

  When I expressed my amazement to the maniac, the warm twinkle in his eyes crystalized into a colder glitter that I recognized from the eyes of Killer the Gila monster and Earl the milk snake.

  “You can’t deeply, fully know a town,” he said, “if you love it. Loving it, you’re charmed by surfaces. To deeply, fully know a town, you’ve got to hate it, loathe it, loathe it with an unquenchable fiery passion. You’ve got to be consumed by a need to learn all its rotten shameful secrets and use them against it, find its hidden cancers and feed them until they metastasize into apocalyptic tumors. You’ve got to live for the day when its every stone and stick will be wiped forever from the face of the earth.”

  I assumed that once upon a time something bad had happened to him in our little tourist mecca. Something more traumatic than being given a lesser hotel room when he had reserved a suite or being unable to buy a ski-lift pass on a busy winter weekend.

  “But when you come right down to it,” Lorrie said (somewhat riskily, it seemed to me), “this whole escapade isn’t about hate or about justice, like you said earlier. It’s about bank robbery. It’s just about money.”

  The maniac’s face turned so livid that from hairline to chin and from ear to ear it looked like one big bruise. His smile went flatline.

  “I don’t care about money,” he said so tightly that the words seemed to escape him without parting his fiercely compressed lips.

  “You’re not breaking into a produce market to steal a lot of carrots and snow peas,” Lorrie said. “You’re robbing a bank.”

  “I’m destroying the bank to break the town.”

  “Money, money, money,” she persisted.

  “This is about vengeance. Well-deserved, long-overdue vengeance. And that’s close enough to justice for me.”

  “Not for me, it isn’t,” Crinkles interjected, leaving his work with the explosives to contribute to the conversation more directly. “This is about money because wealth isn’t just wealth but also the root and stalk and flower of power, and power liberates the powerful while it oppresses the powerless, so to crush what crushes, those who are oppressed must oppress the oppressors.”

  I made no attempt to rerun that sentence through my memory banks. I was afraid that by trying to untangle it, my brain would crash. This was Karl Marx filtered through the lens of Abbott and Costello.

  Aware from our expressions that his point had been too blunt to penetrate, Crinkles stated his philosophy more succinctly: “Some of that filthy stinking pig’s money belongs to me and to lots of other people he exploited to get it.”

  “Gee whiz, take a rest from stupid for a moment,” Lorrie told Crinkles. “Cornelius Snow never exploited you. He died long before you were born.”

  She was on a roll now, insulting everyone who had the power and the motivation to kill us.

  I shook my cuffed hand, thereby shaking hers, to remind her that any spray of bullets she invited was likely to leave me dead, as well.

  Crinkles’s mass of wiry hair seemed to stiffen until he less resembled Art Garfunkel than he did the bride of Frankenstein.

  “What we’re doing here is making a political statement,” he insisted.

  Thus far phlegmatic compared to his companions, Honker joined them, so exacerbated by all this talk of vengeance and politics that his caterpillar eyebrows twitched as if jolts of an electric current enlivened them.

  “Cash,” he said. “That’s all it’s about for me. Cold cash. I’m here to take the money and run. If there wasn’t a bank, I wouldn’t have signed up for this, the rest of it doesn’t matter to me, and if you guys don’t shut up and get the job done—then I’m out of here, and you’re on your own.”

  Honker must have had skills essential to the heist, because his threat quieted his partners.

  Their fury, however, did not abate. They looked like thwarted attack dogs, held back on choke chains, faces dark with unspent rage, eyes hot with violent passion that would not cool until they had been allowed to bite.

  I wished that I had some cookies to give them, maybe German lebkuchen or nice crisp Scotch shortbread. Or chocolate pecan tarts. The poet William Congreve wrote, “Music has charms to soothe the savage breast,” but I suspect good muffins are more effective.

  As if aware that his associates’ submission to a threat did not constitute teamwork, Honker threw a bone to each man’s mania, beginning with Crinkles: “There’s a clock running and we’ve got a lot to do. That’s all I’m saying. And if we just do the job, your political statement will be made, loud and clear.”

  Crinkles bit his lower lip in a manner reminiscent of our young president. Reluctantly he nodded agreement.

  To the green-eyed maniac, Honker said, “You planned this caper ’cause you want justice for your mother’s death. So let’s do the job and get that justice.”

  The librarian-killer’s eyes grew misty, as they had done when his heartstrings had been strummed by my revelation that my mother used to iron my socks.

  “I found the issues of the newspaper that carried the story,” he told Honker.

  “They must have been hard to read,” Honker sympathized.

  “I felt like my heart was being ripped out. I could hardly…force myself through them.” His voice thickened with emotion. “But then I got so angry.”

  “Understandable,” Honker commiserated. “Each of us only gets one mother.”

  “It wasn’t just her being murdered. It was the lies, Honker. Almost everything in the newspaper was a lie.”

  Glancing at his wristwatch, Honker shrugged and said, “Well, what do you expect from newspapers?”

  “Capitalist lapdogs is all they are,” Crinkles observed.

  “They said my mother died in childbirth and Dad shot the doctor in a mad rage, as if that makes any sense.”

  The nameless maniac could have been my age. To the day? To the hour? Almost to the minute? If he’d gotten his good looks and green eyes from his mother…

  Astonished, without thinking, I said, “Punchinello?”

  When Honker furrowed his forehead, his push-broom eyebrows swept shadows of suspicion over his eyes.

  Crinkles slipped his right hand inside his windbreaker, touching the butt of his holstered pistol.

  The shooter of newspapers took a step back, startled that I knew his name.

  I said, “Punchinello Beezo?”

  15

  * * *

  The three clowns placed the last of the explosives and inserted synchronized detonators. Clowns they were, though not in costume. Honker, Crinkles: stage names that would seem entirely appropriate when they were cavorting in size 58 shoes, baggy polka-dot pants, and bright orange wigs. Maybe Punchinello used his real name as his stage name, or perhaps under the big top he was known as Squiggles or Slappy.

  Either in the center ring or out here in the world of rubes, the name Nutsy also would have suited him.

  Lorrie and I sat on the stone floor, our backs against a row of green filing
cabinets filled with the historical records of the bank’s first hundred years. Judging by the preparations being made around us, the building would implode seventy-eight years short of its second century.

  I was in a mood.

  Although I wasn’t yet gripped by terror, which overwhelms the will and paralyzes, my condition was well north of mere misgiving.

  Combined with my anxiety was a sense that fate had not dealt with me fairly. No family of good, kind-hearted bakers should have to be afflicted with two generations of Beezos. It would be like after Churchill wins World War II, a week later a woman moves in next door with twenty-six cats, and it’s Hitler’s batty sister.

  All right, that’s not a brilliant analogy or maybe not even one that makes any sense, but it expresses how I felt. Put-upon. Cruelly victimized. The innocent whipping boy for a universe gone mad.

  In addition to anxiety and a keen sense of injustice, I was tormented by a formless determination. Formless because determination requires the setting of limits within which one must act, but I did not know what those limits should be, didn’t know what to do, when to do it, or how.

  I felt like throwing my head back and screaming in frustration. The only thing preventing me from doing so was the unnerving concern that when I screamed, Honker and Crinkles and Punchinello would scream wildly with me, honk horns, blow whistles, and squeeze rubber bladders that made a farting sound.

  Until that moment, I had never suffered from harlequinaphobia, which is a fear of clowns. Too often to count, I had heard the story of the night I was born, the tale of the murderous chain-smoking fugitive from a circus, but never had Konrad Beezo’s homicidal acts instilled in me an uneasiness about all clowns.

  In less than two hours, the lunatic son had achieved what the father could not. I watched him and his two subordinate merry-andrews at work with the explosives, and they seemed to me to be alien in the most troubling sense—like the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers—passing for human beings but with an ultimate agenda so dark and so strange that it lay beyond human comprehension.

  Like I said, I was in a mood.

  The Tock family’s exquisitely sensitive funny-recognition gene was still functioning. I remained aware of the screwball nature of the situation, but I did not feel in the least amused.

  Insanity is not evil, but all evil is insane. Evil itself is never funny, but insanity sometimes can be. We need to laugh at the irrationality of evil, for in doing so we deny evil’s power over us, diminish its influence in the world, and tarnish the allure it has for some people.

  There in the subcellar of the bank, I failed in my duty to deny, diminish, and tarnish. I was offended by fate, anxious, angry, and even Lorrie Lynn Hicks in all her glory could not lift my spirits.

  She had a lot of questions, as you might imagine. Usually I enjoyed recounting the story of the night of my birth, but not this time. Nevertheless, she got out of me the stuff about Konrad Beezo. She is indefatigable.

  I didn’t mention my grandfather’s predictions. If I brought up that subject, I’d almost inevitably also tell her that back in the newspaper morgue at the library, I’d experienced a semi-precognitive moment of my own, a premonition—sharper than a hunch but fuzzy on the details—that she would be shot.

  I didn’t see anything to be gained by alarming her, especially since my sudden sixth sense might be nothing but hooey, just a flare from an overheated imagination.

  Finished preparing explosives, the out-of-uniform motley fools lit and placed a series of Coleman lanterns to illuminate the chamber when the power failed. They didn’t have enough of them to brighten the entire big room, just the end in which they would be working on the vault.

  Lorrie and I were left sitting at a distance. When the electric lights went off, we would be in shadows.

  Having absorbed my story, Lorrie brooded for a moment and then said, “Are all clowns so angry?”

  “I don’t know a lot of clowns.”

  “You know these three. And Konrad Beezo.”

  “I never met Konrad Beezo. I was like five minutes old when our paths crossed.”

  “I count it as a meet. So regarding clowns and anger, that’s four for four. I’m bummed. It’s like you meet the real Santa Claus and he turns out to have a drinking problem. You do still have the shiv?”

  “The what?” I asked.

  “The shiv.”

  “You mean the nail file?”

  “If that’s what you want to call it,” she said.

  “That’s what it is.”

  “Whatever you say. When are you gonna make your move?”

  “When the time’s right,” I said patiently.

  “Let’s hope that’s before rather than after we’re blown to smithereens.”

  They had finished placing the five gas lanterns. One stood at the foot of the stairs, one at the middle of the long flight, and a third on the wide landing at the top, outside the back door to the vault.

  From a couple of large suitcases, Punchinello unpacked tools, welder’s masks, and other items I couldn’t identify from a distance.

  Honker and Crinkles muscled a wheeled tank of acetylene up the stairs to the landing.

  Lorrie said, “What kind of name is Punchinello?”

  “His father named him after a famous clown. You know, like Punch and Judy.”

  “Punch and Judy are puppets.”

  “Yes,” I said, “but Punch is also a clown.”

  “I didn’t realize that.”

  “He wears a sort of jester hat.”

  She said, “I thought Punch was a car salesman.”

  “Where did you get that idea?”

  “It’s just always the impression I’ve had.”

  “Punch and Judy shows go all the way back to the nineteenth century, maybe the eighteenth,” I said. “There weren’t cars then.”

  “Well, who would want the same job for two centuries? Back then, before cars, he was probably a candlemaker or a blacksmith.”

  She is an enchantress. She casts a spell over you, and you find yourself wanting to see the world from her perspective.

  That’s why I heard myself replying as if Punch were as real as she and I were: “He’s not a candlemaking, blacksmithing sort of guy. That’s just not him. He wouldn’t be fulfilled in that kind of work. Besides, he wears a jester’s hat.”

  “The hat doesn’t prove anything. He could have been a hip sort of blacksmith with a funky style.” She frowned. “He’s always going berserk and beating up Judy, isn’t he? So that makes five.”

  “Five what?”

  “Five angry clowns and no happy ones at all.”

  “To be fair,” I said, “Judy’s always beating the crap out of him, too.”

  “Is she a clown?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Well, Punch is her husband, so at the very least she’s a clown by marriage. So that makes six of them, all angry. This is quite a revelation.”

  Elsewhere in town, the transformer blew up. It must have been housed in an underground vault, for the rumble of the muffled blast seemed to translate laterally through the walls of the bank’s subcellar.

  Instantly the electric lights went off. The farther end of the room glowed with lantern light, while Lorrie and I sat in gloom.

  16

  * * *

  On the spacious landing at the top of the stairs, Honker and Crinkles stood in welder’s masks, full-body fireproof aprons, and flared-cuff asbestos gloves. With the acetylene torch, Honker cut open the sealed perimeter of the steel door.

  Smiling, shaking his head, Punchinello dropped to one knee in front of Lorrie and me. “You’re really Jimmy Tock?”

  “James,” I said.

  “Son of Rudy Tock.”

  “That’s right.”

  “My father says Rudy Tock saved his life.”

  I said, “Dad might be surprised to hear that.”

  “Well, Rudy Tock is a modest man as well as a man of courage,” Punc
hinello declared. “But when that phony nurse, with a poisoned dagger in her fist, was sneaking up behind the great Konrad Beezo, my father, he would have been a goner if your dad hadn’t shot her dead.”

  As I sat in stupefaction, Lorrie said, “I hadn’t heard this part.”

  To me, Punchinello said, “You haven’t told her?”

  “He’s just as modest as his father,” Lorrie told Punchinello.

  As the smell of hot steel and molten welding compound spread through the room, Lorrie said, “What about the phony nurse?”

  Settling all the way to the floor, cross-legged in front of us, Punchinello said, “She was dispatched to the hospital to murder the great Konrad Beezo, my mother, and me.”

  “Who dispatched her?” Lorrie wondered.

  Even in the shadows, I could see a fever of hatred flare in his remarkable eyes as he said through clenched teeth: “Virgilio Vivacemente.”

  Under the pressurized circumstances, I heard his reply—which he delivered with more sibilants than the words actually contained—as just an ear-pleasing series of meaningless syllables.

  Apparently Lorrie made no more of it than I did because she said, “Gesundheit.”

  “The hateful aerialists,” he said acidly. “The world-famous Flying Vivacementes. Trapeze artists, high-wire walkers, overpaid prima donnas. The most arrogant, most pompous, most conceited, most overrated of them all is Virgilio, the paterfamilias, my mother’s father. Virgilio Vivacemente, swine of swines.”

  “Now, now,” Lorrie said, “that’s not a nice thing to say about your grandfather.”

  This admonition triggered a rush of rejection from Punchinello: “I deny his right to be my grandfather, I refuse him, renounce him, I repudiate that old preening pile of crap!”

  “That sounds terribly final,” Lorrie said. “Personally, I’d pretty much always give a grandparent one more chance.”

  Leaning toward her, eager to explain, Punchinello said, “When my mother married my father, her family was shocked, furious. That a Flying Vivacemente should marry a clown! To them, aerialists are not merely the royalty of the circus but demigods, while clowns are to them a lower life-form, the scum of the big top.”

  “Maybe if clowns were less angry,” Lorrie said, “other circus people would like them more.”

  He seemed not to hear her, so determined was he to make the case against his mother’s family.

  “When Mother married the great Konrad Beezo, the aerialists first shunned her, then scorned her, then disinherited and disowned her. Because she married for love, married a man they considered to be beneath her class, she was not their daughter anymore, she was dirt to them!”

  “So,” Lorrie said, “let me get this straight. They were all in the same circus, your mom living on the clown end of the encampment with your father, the Vivacemente family living in the upper-class neighborhood, on the road together but apart. The tension must have been uncomfortable.”

  “You can’t know! Every performance, the Vivacementes prayed to Jesus that the great Beezo would break his spine and be paralyzed for life when he was shot out of a cannon, and every performance my father prayed to Jesus that their entire