“Well, Derek,” I said, as we neared the barns, “what did you think of the JU-52?”
“The plane?” Derek asked, to which I nodded, lighting a cigarette. “You mean the machine ‘the plane’ or the headquarters ‘the plane’?”
It was a question of promising discernment. “Whichever one impressed you more.”
“I like the machine-plane, frankly,” he replied; then, when I offered him one of my cigarettes conspiratorially, he studied me in that strikingly ingenuous way that so many autistic children can—which often tells you they know just what you’re doing—and simply said:
“I don’t smoke—Ambyr doesn’t like us to.”
“I’m sorry, I should have known. She’s a very smart young woman, your sister.” I caught myself: “Okay if I call her your sister? Is there something else you prefer?”
He smiled and began scratching his dark hair in reply, the latter a movement he’d clearly picked up from Lucas, but which looked undeniably appealing when he did it, as well. “I, uh—I don’t really know what to tell people she is. I mean, she’s not my mom. But she’s not my sister, either—not really. So, I mean—what is she?”
“Well,” I answered, keeping our pace slow, “she’s your guardian. And, of course, your friend.”
“Right, I remember that word—‘guardian.’ ” He began bouncing one fist in an open hand uneasily. “But—I just can’t remember what that’s supposed to make me.” He had raised his voice, not so much in desperation as in frustration; and I tried quickly to explain the situation further:
“Technically, that makes you her ward—did anyone ever use that term, after your parents and Lucas’ disappeared?”
He nodded. “Right, yeah, ward. But—I don’t know, I never really understood what it meant, even after they told me.”
“Well—you remember Bruce Wayne?” I asked, calculating that the Batman reference might be one that he’d understand.
And he did: “Yeah, that’s right.” Then, finally, he let himself laugh, if only a bit. “Bruce Wayne, he had Dick Grayson for a ward. But me and Ambyr, that ain’t the same thing at all!”
“Well, actually it is,” I answered, chuckling along with his laughter. “Money isn’t the thing that defines us, Derek.”
“Simple for you to say!” he answered, still laughing quietly. “Look where you live, look what you’ve done—solved crimes, been on the covers of newspapers—”
“Don’t tell me Lucas actually showed you that stupid newspaper cover?”
“Sure, it’s right on your Google page!” Derek said. “ ‘The Sorcerer of Death,’ with a picture of you coming out of some old building that looks like it was built for Batman—”
“The Criminal Courts Building,” I explained. “In New York City.”
“That’s right, I remember.” Derek began to nod certainly again, an action that clearly gave him a sense of reassurance and calm. Then he laughed once more. “And there was this little picture of Mike—of Dr. Li—in the corner, and it said ‘And His Apprentice.’ ”
“Do yourself a favor,” I said. “Don’t bring that detail up to Mike.”
“Don’t worry,” Derek laughed, in his disarming way. “I wouldn’t.”
“You know, Derek—I’m starting to understand that you’re a lot smarter than almost anybody gives you credit for being…” I grasped my cane in my right hand and put my left forearm on Derek’s shoulder, seemingly for greater support, but in fact to build on the at least momentary camaraderie that appeared to have been established between us. “Come on,” I said. “There’s somebody I want you to meet—”
And then I caught sight of something: just as we were passing by the shed behind the equipment barn where the twin Arctic Cat Prowlers were tucked away, what seemed a crack of some kind in the raised center portion of the roof of the machine I’d been driving the night we took Gracie up the mountain became visible.
“What the…?” I murmured, lifting my arm from Derek’s shoulder and moving toward the shed. I initially thought that the damage must have been done by a tree branch that we had passed at high speed. Still, it was something that, if I could catch it from that distance, I could count on hearing about at dinner that night; so I figured I’d better have a quick look. “Shit, that’s all I need,” I mumbled. “Come on—I’ve got to check something out before we go to the house…” Seeing that I was headed toward the fairly secluded back of the barn, Derek seemed to grow edgy once again, even frightened. “What’s the matter?” I asked, moving back toward him.
“This ain’t about shucking corn, is it?” he said, haltingly and tremulously.
“Of course it is, Derek—I just noticed that I may have busted the roof on one of the ATVs we took up the mountain the other night. And trust me, if my aunt has already seen it, then I’m going to get my ass handed to me—you know the feeling, right?”
Derek paused a moment, his gaze shifting from side to side but his head remaining very still. “That’s really it?”
“Yeah, that’s really it,” I said, waving him over, and then continuing on my way again. “What’d you think I was going to do, take you out back and rough you up?” I asked, chuckling a bit.
He stepped quickly to pull up almost even with me. “I—didn’t really know,” he said, scratching at his head in that same way again and trying to laugh along with me; but he’d been rattled.
“What possible reason could I have for doing that?”
I studied his reaction as we neared the shed; and a wave of darkness, of gloomy experience, passed over his features. “People don’t always need reasons for what they do,” he said quietly.
It was a sad summary of all he’d known at home or in school, I thought; but I also knew that if he’d wanted to talk about it, he would have. And so I simply added quietly, “No. No, they do not…”
Once at the shed, I made straight for the damaged roof of the one Prowler. The side of the raised center of the roof had been damaged, all right, but only after being pierced by a bullet, one whose report neither Lucas, Marcianna, nor I had heard during our descent from the mountain. I knew that there was little to no chance that my great-aunt was unaware of the matter: it was likely one of the reasons that she had insisted on our coming to dinner that evening. More important, it meant that someone had come perilously close, not simply to frightening us, but to harming or perhaps even killing at least one of us: someone who was a good enough shot to hit a fast-moving vehicle, and who possessed a high-quality suppressor. The bullet hole had pierced the roof just above the back of the driver’s seat at an almost forty-five-degree angle, a trajectory that, when I traced it, meant that it had passed out the open side of the Prowler’s cab, just behind Marcianna and in front of Lucas, which would make retrieving the slug an impossibility. Marcianna, Lucas, and I had only narrowly escaped injury; and I immediately started seething.
“Those mother-fuckers,” I murmured slowly, in near-disbelief. “Those absolute pieces of shit…”
Derek, meanwhile—probably as a way to either avoid or try to defuse my anger—had stepped up onto the machine to fix his attention on the spot where the bullet had pierced the roof. “I don’t know who did this, but I don’t think it was, like, a mistake or anything,” he announced. “The fiberglass up here is good and thick. Wasn’t any varmint gun, either, even one with a heavy load—say a .22-250 or some such. Nope. Bigger lead, more powder—probably a hollow-point .308.” He glanced my way once, quickly and furtively. “Somebody was trying to tell you guys something.”
“You know about guns, do you, Derek?” I asked, hoping to learn more.
“Me? Oh. Sure…” He stepped back down off the Prowler. “That was about the only thing my dad and me had to talk about, being as I didn’t drink beer. But when we’d go hunting every year, chances were good that it would be me bringing a buck home. And it drove him crazy, most times. He’d tell me, ‘Derek, you’re stupider than a box of rocks, but you can shoot, all right.’ Later, since he figur
ed that was all I could manage to do right, he started yelling about me joining the military and becoming a sniper. He was just being an even bigger jerk, of course, because he knew the military wasn’t going to take me…”
“Sounds as if our fathers might have known each other,” I said, still probing, and getting a small but welcome laugh out of him. “You’re sure about that round?”
“Hunh?” I’d caught him trying to puzzle with the idea that his life might have in any way borne a resemblance to my own. “Oh. Yeah, like I say, a pretty hard-core .308 shell, with a hollow-point slug, would be my guess. Probably.”
“And what kind of gun would shoot it?” I pursued; and slowly but surely, I could see Derek’s uneasiness and confusion turning to pride at being consulted on this matter.
“Plenty,” he answered with a shrug. “In fact, pretty much everybody has some kinda one that does. Remington, Marlin, SIG Sauer…”
“How about a Savage 10FP?” I suggested innocently.
“Well, yeah, sure,” he said. “And if you guys didn’t hear the shot, that means a silencer or a suppressor—about the same thing, really—and you can buy a 10FP that’s suppressor-ready pretty easy; don’t even have to go to a gun show, though if you go to the show, you could pick up the rifle and the suppressor at the same time. But, see, the Savage, that’s like the SIG Sauer, I mean, it’s more of a tactical than a real hunting rifle. It’s what the state’s snipers use, mostly. You got any reason to think it might be them that were trying to—” He stopped suddenly, either frightened by the thought he’d just given voice to or realizing that he’d said too much, I couldn’t say which; but I didn’t want him going back into his defensive mode.
“No,” I said quickly, “nothing that serious. I hope anyway.”
His brows arched and his eyes went wide. “Well—either way, somebody was sure out to at least scare you guys, and really bad…”
“Maybe,” I said, as casually as I could. “But we don’t scare so easy.” That didn’t seem to reassure Derek much; as for me, I now had a whole new range of things to consider about the unusual young man before me: was his talk intended as mere expert advice? Or was it what he understood to be (probably because he’d been told by someone that I would take it as) a coded warning? Was he less the facilitator that I’d thought must exist, and had told Lucas to scout for, than he was a dupe—a willing dupe, yes, but a dupe, nevertheless?
“Well,” I said, turning away from the shed. “It happened, nothing we can do about it, now. I’ll just have to go take my punishment. Come on, Derek.” I headed once more for the house, much more quickly than I’d been moving before. “That corn isn’t going to shuck itself…”
I didn’t feel any too proud of myself, as we walked on: learning the things I had from Derek, important as they were, was one of the simply shitty parts of the job of criminal profiling. When someone of whom you are suspicious also turns out to be someone for whom you feel enormous sympathy, and when you must go on playing a role that will allow and encourage him to draw himself further into a psychological snare that you have devised using his own unsuspecting statements…Well, there is a cheap, ugly feeling that accompanies the process, and I’m not sure I’ve ever felt it quite so intensely as I did just then.
My qualms about Derek aside, however, I had to push on; for whether the young man was or wasn’t hiding something vital was now a matter for Clarissa to determine. It was from my great-aunt that I had learned to give voice to whatever ability to read people I possessed as a boy and still retain; besides, testing Derek would help keep the old girl off my back…
{iii.}
To make everything at least appear on the up-and-up, I led Derek around to the back of the house and the kitchen, where all preparation of food and cooking would be done. The modern kitchen had been built into the old winter kitchen, while the former summer kitchen—that space in which, long ago, meals had been prepared when the weather became too oppressive to stand over a hot wood stove inside—now formed a large pantry and preparation area, with a table where the household staff could eat indoors.
Of course, “the staff,” these days, meant only Annabel, whose duties included those of what would once have been three people: cook, housekeeper, and all-around attendant to my great-aunt. When we reached the open kitchen door, out of which were just beginning to float the smells of a full steak dinner such as we were usually granted when company was present, Derek and I discovered, as I had hoped, that Annabel was in on what was taking place, at least enough to have asked two of the hands if they would stay on, for a few extra bucks, and do the shucking of the corn that I had told Derek was to be our job, as well as prep the other vegetables for dinner. Those two, Happy Dearborn and Chick Thorne, were solid men that I knew, both in their late thirties with families of their own in towns other than Surrender; and I knew that Annabel had likely had no trouble talking them into the extra work. Plus there were perks for doing such jobs as they were now laboring over, the main one being that Clarissa allowed them, along with several other hands, to hunt the mountain during deer season, so long as each gave a portion of the meat from their kills to my great-aunt, allowing us to enjoy venison year-round.
After greeting Happy and Chick, I led the way into the kitchen, where piles of garden-grown carrots, broccoli, and lettuce sat on one butcher-block table. Pots of potatoes were boiling on the gas stove; but the grilling of the steaks would take place just shortly before we ate, on a large brick-and-grate structure outside, one used for that purpose during all months of the year save the very coldest.
Annabel—a deceptively delicate-looking woman, with carefully styled white hair and remarkably youthful skin—stood stirring the potatoes, wearing one of several nearly identical dresses that might have dated back decades, or might just as well have been made yesterday: for she did all her own sewing, as well as all the mending for my great-aunt. As Derek hung back, I rushed up behind her, but my cane gave me away: before I could grab a fork and stick it into one of the nearly cooked potatoes, Annabel said with a gentle smile:
“If I were you, Trajan, I would get myself cleaned up and ready for cocktails, instead of trying to steal potatoes.” Then she began drying her hands on her grey apron, which was bordered in lace, and turned her marvelously perceptive blue eyes on me. “You have some explaining to do, unless I’m mistaken.”
I released the fork with a frown. “And you are never mistaken, Annabel. How bad is it?”
“Well,” Annabel answered, heading for the vegetables, which I helped her load into an ancient ceramic trough sink, “she seems to have gotten it into her head that you put your life in danger Sunday night. Yours, Marcianna’s, and the young boy’s, the one who’s been working with you.” She turned to Derek inquisitively, but never let go of the charming smile. “Speaking of which…”
“Oh, right,” I said. “Come on in, Derek,” I told the kid, who was almost clinging to the doorway.
“But—” he mumbled. “But I thought we were going to shuck the corn.”
“Well, if you’d like to help the men,” Annabel said, “I’m sure you can.”
“Oh, come on, Derek, just say hello and be thankful that Annabel saved you from all that.” I introduced them, and watched Derek very shyly give Annabel his full name, after which he tried to identify himself within the Kurtz family structure: no mean feat. But Annabel cut him off, gently saying that she was fully aware of his background. The kid eased up some, to which I clapped him on the shoulder and pronounced, “Well, then, come on—let’s see if we can roust Mike. He in his room getting cleaned up, Annabel?”
“He’s in his room,” she answered, starting in on washing the vegetables. “Just what he’s doing there, I couldn’t tell you. It involved a telephone, a computer, and a printer, that’s all I can say for sure.” She gave me another enigmatic smile. “And he’s been none too careful about watching his volume, if you know what I mean…”
I frowned momentarily. “I know what you mean,
all right. Jesus-fucking-H—” Annabel slapped the rim of the sink with a wooden spoon: for she was, like Pete Steinbrecher, one of the very few people, in Surrender or anywhere else, that I would have called a genuine Christian, and I’d transgressed. “I’m sorry!” I rushed in to say. “I’m sorry, Annabel. But that means Clarissa is aware of whatever he’s been babbling about, right?” She nodded certainly. “Well—all right, then, Derek. Let’s see what Mike’s so worked up about, and how much damage he may have done…”
I led the way through the swinging door that connected the kitchen to a long hallway that terminated at the dining room, and off of which branched several bedrooms originally designed for the staff. The wide, original wooden floors of the hall were covered (here as in most of the house) by Oriental rugs that my great-grandfather had begun to collect on his flights around Europe during the 1930s in the JU-52, a passion that his daughter Clarissa had carried on during her own wanderings around North Africa and the Middle East throughout the Sixties. On the hallway walls were dozens of pictures of people Clarissa had met during these travels, some of them already famous, some of them soon to be famous (or infamous), and some simple Tuareg or Arab tribesmen: black-and-white shots of the type considered highly romantic, at the time, but which looked, in the post-9/11 world, as if they had been taken in a parallel universe.
As I moved toward Mike’s room, which was situated below and slightly to the side of the house’s back staircase (built so that the staff could get to the family rooms above from the kitchen and outside without being seen by their employers unless summoned), Derek paused to study what was, for him, the strangest and most exotic element common to each image, which he pointed out to me:
“So, the blond lady who’s in all these pictures,” he said. “That’s your great-aunt? She’s beautiful…”