So for all his experience and expectation, the sight of Frank’s face took Luther Plunkitt off guard. It rocked him. It penetrated his professional purpose, struck through the depth of his craft to the human awareness beneath. He was like an actor, thoroughly immersed in a role, who suddenly realized the theater is on fire. He found he had to talk to himself, the warden to the man, to keep himself straight, to fight off that sense of drifting dizziness.
Now lookit, he thought, and his lips worked fitfully as he looked down at the man on the gurney. There was a girl too. There was a pregnant girl and people loved her. A father, a mother, a husband—loved her. There was a child inside her—a daughter, a son, a grandchild—who would have been in her arms, against her breast, would’ve looked up into her face. And this man—this Frank of yours, good old Frank here—he killed her, he killed all that Shot her in the throat, left her choking, dying. For some money, for a little loan—doesn’t matter what the reason was. Doesn’t matter what his life was like before, or the state his mind was in at the time. He had no goddamned right. He’s a man, like me. He had a choice, like I do. He didn’t have to do it and he did. That’s what a man is, after all, in the end. A man is the creature who can say “No.” A man … damn it.
To his amazement, Luther felt his right hand begin to tremble against his pants leg. That had never happened to him before. He slipped the hand into his pocket. For some reason this little lecture of his had only made matters worse. He had to open his mouth to breathe now. He felt the room spinning around him, spinning off through chartless depths. His fingers curled in his pocket into a fist as he tried to hold himself in place, hold the whole room, the whole operation in place, repeating, chanting determinedly against the giddy sensation:
A man is the creature who can say “No.”
“Noooooo!” I shrieked, as the cruisers closed in on me. There were two of them now: the second had come skidding out of a McDonald’s parking lot as if alerted by the first. They were both behind me, closing in to the left and the right. I jammed my foot down so hard against the gas that my whole body was pushed straight against the back of the seat, my arms stretching out to reach the wheel. My face must have looked like a skull, the skin was pulled that tight around the bone in my openmouthed desperation and fear. In front of me, the traffic was disappearing as the cars slashed off to either side to avoid the howling sirens and the whipping lights. The Tempo flew down the black highway like an arrow, like a bullet. And still, the bastards were gaining on me.
“Stop! For Jesus’ sake!” cried Mrs. Russel. “Let them help us!”
But I did not think they would help us—there was no time to make them understand—and I did not stop.
I drove on and, for a wild stretch of seconds, there was nothing but the sound of sirens and the flashing red and the hood of the Tempo crashing endlessly through the wall of night.
Then one siren changed pitch and the first cruiser zigged out to the side and overtook me.
“Pull over! Stop the car and pull over!”
The voice from the cruiser’s loudspeaker was like a thunder god’s. I glanced that way and saw the side of the cop’s car edge closer to mine. If I tried to outrace him, he would dash ahead and cut me off. If I tried to swerve and avoid him, I would lose control and die. There was no choice. I took my foot off the gas.
The Tempo’s speed broke at once. The car slowed quickly. The cruiser slipped ahead of me. Sidled in front of me, filling my windshield with red light. I saw its brake lights flare and glanced into my mirror to see the second cruiser pulling in tight behind me.
“Thank God,” Mrs. Russel said with a breath.
I hauled the wheel to the left and stomped down on the gas. The Tempo shot forward. Its front fender sliced away from the lead cruiser’s rear, found a wisp of empty air and dove into it, pulling past the cops’ left side. We were sucked into the dark road ahead and I was in front of them again. I was shooting away.
“Shit, you’re crazy!” Mrs. Russel roared.
I pushed the Tempo back up to its limit. The cop cars shuddered, then howled into pursuit behind me.
“You’re a crazy man!”
“They’ll stop us!” I screamed.
And, without thinking, I turned to look at her.
She was pushed so far back into her seat that she seemed to be trying to meld with it. Her face, slapped by the flashers as the cruisers closed in, was pulled taut, wrapped tight around a high-pitched scream.
“Watch out, watch out, watch out!” she cried.
I was already turning back to the windshield, following the white line of her wide-eyed stare. It seemed to take forever, that turning back. I could feel my head go round and the slow throb of the ache inside my head, and the weight of the alcohol squatting on my brain, and the weariness in my arms and legs, the pain behind my eyes—I could feel all of it in the slim edge of an instant. And I was aware of the first cruiser pulling up beside me again, the other car drilling through the little distance to my rear. I saw a splash of searing brightness ahead of me. I heard Mrs. Russel let fly a mindless yell.
And then the Tempo burned over the straight edge of the boulevard and tore full speed, shrieking, into Dead Man’s Curve.
2
It would be nice to think Frank Beachum had some vision at the end. In that last quarter of an hour, say, as the minute hand edged up over the closing arc of the hour’s circle. It would be nice to think some revelation came to him, some solid piece of understanding. Christ, say, might’ve floated beneath the fluorescent lights with open arms. The heavens might have opened and angels sung. Or, more believably, in those final fifteen minutes, in the maw of death, an incomprehensible but perfect calm of faith and understanding might have washed over his soul like warm bathwater. Although, in that case, I guess, someone would’ve seen him smile.
So maybe he had a more modern, more literary, vision, though Frank was not a modern, not a literary, man. Still, you know the kind of thing I mean: the moments might have stretched out until he realized each one was eternal, or Life might have revealed itself to him in pristine clarity until he saw that it was perfect as it was, and everything was All Right, if one only knew it. I don’t know what-all; that shit’s in books; you can read them.
But if you’re interested in the impressions of this reporter—and I guess you are, you’ve gotten as far as this—I would say that none of these visions, these clotures, were written in his eyes, and none were going on in his mind. He had, I think, in the end, reached that stage of fear in which self-awareness is gone and the entire body—and the soul too, if you want—becomes an organ of perception, sensation meditating on sensation. Frank had not gone mad or anything. Life had not been merciful enough to send him mad. But he wasn’t thinking either, not the way we think of thought. He was seeing, merely: seeing the rough ridges between the white cinderblocks of the wall, seeing the clock and the sweep of the hands over the circle of the clock, the faces hovering over him, Luther, Maura, the guard, the saline running invisibly through the clear tube into his arm—he was turning his eyes from one of these to the next unable to stay with any because each successive sight ignited in him that instinctive jolt of horror that a serpent would, for instance, if you suddenly found it in your cereal bowl. So he was seeing, and he was feeling fear, there on the gurney in the small, white room. And, at the same time, or in the minuscule interstices, he was remembering; not in words or jointed impressions—but in bursts of sensation: the smell of grass, the worry lines at the corners of Bonnie’s mouth, the gush of blood and matter in which his Gail had squeezed from between her mother’s legs, the heat of summer, the taste of beer—these memories hatched and vanished in his head in the split seconds between the sight of one thing and the next, and with each he was immersed in a bottomless depth of sorrow, a vast subaqueous plain of loneliness and mourning.
And that was all for him. The warden, after a word to the guard, was stepping out of the room now to greet the witnesses behind the wall. H
is deputy, Zach Platt, was in the corner, murmuring into his headset. The guard stood with hands folded over his chest, gazing down speculatively at the condemned man beneath his sheet. And Frank lay there waiting as the circle of the hour moved toward completion, his eyes darting, his body held motionless by the thick leather straps. Whatever attempts he might once have made to understand his life, his death, were over now. And for Frank Beachum, at eleven forty-five that Monday night, there was nothing but memory and terror and sadness—and the things that happened.
For Mr. Lowenstein, on the other hand, there was Debussy. “Clair de lune,” to which he had always been partial. He had it playing softly on the CD player and the clear, watery lilt of the piano made a mellow background noise in the small sitting room where he liked to work at night. It was a good place to work. He had his wing chair there, with the muted floral upholstery, and the low antique ottoman on which his slippered feet could rest. There was a small Persian rug on the floor, nicely faded, and a dainty escritoire by the window with pigeonholes for his writing supplies. There were books—the wonderful, muted colors of the bindings of old books on every wall. And Mrs. Lowenstein was there, bent over her needlework in an old-fashioned armless sewing chair, silent but companionable.
The owner and publisher of the St. Louis News was a tall, fit man in his sixties, with a full head of coiffed, silver hair. He had a grave, sage, handsome face, deep-browed and not unkind. He was working now in his wing chair with a Mont Blanc pen on a yellow legal pad. He had never used a word processor in his life and did not intend to. He was writing a letter to his employees, offering his thoughts and condolences on the tragic death of Michelle Ziegler, one of their own. He had already written a letter to the family, and a special note for the editorial page. Both of them had taken him a long time to finish.
This letter too was not an easy chore. Mr. Lowenstein was a scrupulously honest man and he had not liked Michelle very much. He had kept her on staff—as he had kept me—because Alan defended her, and he trusted Alan to the core. For himself, he thought she was a supercilious and unpleasant person, much too full of herself for one so young. At the same time, he felt that his personal likes and dislikes didn’t amount to very much now, at the end of things. So he was choosing his words with kindness and generosity—though, still, with a niggling regard for the truth.
“Clair de lune” helped him think, as did the room, and his handsome, quiet wife who looked up at him and smiled from time to time. But for the last minute or so, something had been bothering him, intruding on his consciousness, interrupting his train of thought.
Sirens. It was several moments before he looked up from the yellow page and realized what it was. He glanced at the grandfather clock in the room’s far corner. It was quarter of twelve and for the last minute or so, there had been sirens going off, getting closer, half a dozen of them at least it sounded like.
“Must be something going on,” he murmured. He looked at his wife over the top of his reading glasses.
“A fire maybe,” she said, and bent to her work again. “Or another accident up on the curve.”
Mr. Lowenstein kept his head raised. He was not really a journalist—he’d made his money in hotels—but now that he’d bought the paper he liked to think of himself as a journalist, so he listened for another second or two with what he felt to be journalistic curiosity.
He was about to return to his letter when he made out another sound, separate from the sirens, closer than they were, and coming even closer now, getting even louder. It was a rumbling, clattering sound with a low sort of sizzle around it. He could not for the life of him imagine what it was.
“Hmph,” said Mr. Lowenstein.
He set the legal pad on the small lampstand beside his chair. He stood, pulling his port-wine bathrobe closed around his silk pajamas. He moved to the window beside the escritoire and bent down to peer out over the dark hill of lawn to the empty street below.
To the fading accompaniment of sirens, that other sound grew even louder still. The rumble became a roar. The clatter grew to a hellish metallic banging. The sizzle expanded to a snaky hiss. And then, Mr. Lowenstein, tilting his head and pulling his reading glasses to the very tip of his nose, saw exactly what kind of sound it was.
It was the sound a car makes traveling at high speed when its muffler has fallen off and is dragged along beneath it, throwing two great flame-bright streams of sparks out from either side of the chassis.
Or, to be specific, it was the Temp.
Those poor cops. They had never stood a chance on that lethal turn. Something really ought to be done about that place.
We had all three gone into it together. The two cruisers flanking me, the lights, the sirens battering my sides. But only I had realized that we were never going to make it through. So I didn’t even try it. I pulled my foot off the gas and let it hang above the brake without coming down. On the instant, the two cruisers shot past me into the curve. I fought the wheel over slowly, waiting for the skid—and when it came, I kept on turning into it, the car screeching under me, spinning with me, all the way around. Through the windshield, over Mrs. Russel’s scream, I saw the world go into a carousel blur. I heard brakes in their death-throes and horns in their rage as the Tempo spun and spun, sliding sideways over the macadam. I eased down on the brake now, trying to rein the Tempo in. I caught a glimpse of the two cruisers lifting into the air as they broke across the curb. The first one slid wildly across the open space of the car lot. The second one followed, slamming broadside into the first one’s trunk. Both cars halted, smoking, with the crash. And then the Tempo was around, and they were out of sight. The road was before me again. I straightened the wheel out, and hit the gas.
And I was gone—good-bye—I was long-gone Steveroo. I looked up into my rearview as my tires grabbed hold of the boulevard and saw the cops—four of them—pouring out of their steaming cruisers and staggering round the ends of them to watch me pull away.
And then I gritted my teeth and turned my full attention to the road ahead.
I didn’t lose the muffler until right inside the terrace gate: a little redbrick princess’s castle that guards the entry to Lowenstein’s road. There was a large clocktower at the center of its three-pinnacled roof. I glanced up at it as we shot past and saw the big hand breaking through the quarter hour. So I didn’t spot the first speed bump and hit it hard. They’re an idiosyncrasy of the St. Louis rich—those bumps in the road that keep deliverymen and other hoi polloi from joyriding at high speeds past the city’s more stately mansions. The Tempo struck it and flew into the air, came bellyflopping down right on top of the second bump. The muffler crunched loudly and the Tempo began to make a noise like a giant choking on his gruel. As I pushed the car over the next bump and the next, great swaths of spark began to shoot out into the night at either side of me.
Through this flying fire and a curl of black oil smoke and the dark, I saw the Lowenstein mansion: an unassailaby huge Georgian block of red brick, its two chimneys silhouetted against the gibbous moon, the columned portico with its wrought-iron balcony jutting out at me austerely. I guided the Tempo to the curb and pressed the brake down, evenly but fast, ignoring the screech of the wheels, and the gutter of the muffler, and the last thick shower of embers arcing over the curb, onto the sidewalk.
The Tempo stopped and its engine died—like that, without a sputter, before I even touched the key.
“Jesus!” said Mrs. Russel.
“Hmph,” said Mr. Lowenstein again.
He saw me, at the base of the stone stairway that ran down the front of his lawn to the sidewalk. I was walking around the car on clearly trembling legs, holding onto its hood for support, coming around the front as Mrs. Russel spilled out of the passenger door and pulled herself unsteadily to her feet. He saw me take the black woman’s arm. He saw the two of us climb the stairs and hurry across the grass toward his front door.
He straightened, taking the reading glasses from his nose, folding t
hem and slipping them into the pocket of his bathrobe.
“What is it, darling?” his wife said from the chair behind him.
“It’s Steve Everett from the paper.” He turned to her with a distant, thoughtful smile.
“Oh?” she said. “One of your reporters?”
“Mm.” Mr. Lowenstein nodded. “A dyed-in-the-wool son-of-a-bitch,” he told her quietly. “But he sure does know how to drive a car.”
3
Midnight. At the stroke precisely, the tan phone rang in the supply room. Arnold McCardle picked it up and heard the voice of Robert Callahan, the Director of the Department of Corrections.
“I have spoken to a duly designated representative of the governor,” Callahan said, speaking the formula in a stiff, stilted voice that did not go with his midwestern twang. “And no stay has been issued. You are to proceed with the execution.”
Arnold McCardle nodded his heavy head. “I read you,” he said. He replaced the tan phone in its cradle. He managed a nod at Reuben Skycock, who turned to the executioners, Frick and Frack. With a hand on each one’s elbow, Skycock guided the two toward the control panel of the lethal injection machine. By then, McCardle had turned to the small intercom on the shelf beside the phones. He pressed the talk button and said firmly, “We have a go.”
McCardle’s voice came over Zachary Platt’s headset. The deputy superintendent nodded at Luther Plunkitt. Luther held his hand steady by an iron force of will as he reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and removed the folded death warrant. At the same time, Zachary Platt turned to the window behind him. Pulling the cord, he raised the blind.