"I thought maybe you were too busy," she added.
"No, I'm not," I assured her.
She struggled to straighten herself, which clearly required considerable effort, and watching this struggle against such close physical restraint, I thought of how different Katherine must have been from Alice at the same age, strolling around her grandfather's farm in the bright sunlight, reading nature poems, writing about a natural order she'd evidently thought totally beneficent.
"I looked them up," Alice said, some measure of energy returning to her. "The men in Katherine's story." She handed me a page, the names written in her neat script: Bittaker, Joubert, Ionosyan.
"They're all murderers." She groaned very softly and shifted again. "The thing is, how would Katherine have known about them? She didn't have the Internet, so she couldn't just look things up. And even if she'd gone to the library, how could she have found out about all these foreign crimes?"
I knew that even now the Winthrop Library had a limited collection on such subjects, and that twenty years before, that collection would have been even more limited, if it had existed at all.
"So where do you think she got all that information?" I asked.
"Could it have been from Maldrow?" Alice asked tentatively, a mere testing of the speculative waters. "He told her about Albert Fish, remember?"
"Yes, he did."
She looked at me wonderingly. "But that means he was a real person. That Katherine didn't just make him up."
"But if he were real, wouldn't someone have seen him?" I asked.
"I looked back over everything we've read so far," Alice answered. "And I noticed that except for the first time, Maldrow comes to Katherine on foggy days or at night. Or they go to a place that's deserted. Like the fairgrounds."
"But that's the way people write these weird type of stories," I said. "Always fog, stuff like that."
Alice took this in for a moment, then said, "But maybe, in his line of work, Maldrow has to come and go ... unseen."
There was an argument to be made for this, though it seemed to rest upon an eerie foundation.
"Because what he does can't be legal," Alice added. "Unless he's a bounty hunter."
"A bounty hunter." I smiled. "Very good, Alice. You could be right."
She nodded toward the pages I'd already taken from my briefcase. "Let's see if I am," she said.
NOW
"So you told her about Fish, that filthy old child murderer," the Chief says quietly. "Yes."
"And it was the story of Fish's execution that first showed you her potential," the Chief adds. "Tell me what you think she got from that story. This 'something' that makes her different."
"She saw that Fish was unreachable," Maldrow answers gravely. "That he was beyond punishment."
The Chief peers at Maldrow quizzically. "Beyond punishment? He was electrocuted. Isn't that punishment?"
"Not for him," Maldrow says. "That's what Katherine realized. That's what she sensed about his death." He leans forward. "When I described what happened to Fish—that he was electrocuted—she reacted..." He stops, considers his words. "She felt his dying ... felt it physically."
The Chief looks at Maldrow intently. "And learned what?"
"You know what happened," Maldrow continues. "How Fish had inserted all those metal sewing needles into himself, how the needles shorted out the electric chair the first time they tried to kill him."
"Katherine felt that?" the Chief asks. "Fish's pain?"
"Not his pain, no," Maldrow answers. "That's what was unusual. She felt the pain the way Fish must have felt it. And so it wasn't really pain at all. Not for him. For him, it was the ultimate pleasure, and because of that, he was beyond punishment."
"Because he felt pain as pleasure and relished it," the Chief says.
Maldrow nods. "And since Fish loathed himself, he welcomed death. That means that he was beyond anything that could be done to him. He would delight in punishment and find joy in oblivion, and because of that, he would always win."
Maldrow waits for the Chief to respond, but there is only silence, the Chief's eyes now more somber than before.
"Shall I go on?" Maldrow asks.
"Yes."
Maldrow draws the photograph from his jacket pocket and places it faceup on the table. "The picture was taken before she was attacked. One week before."
The Chief looks at the photograph, Katherine in the front yard of the farmhouse, the garage to her right, dark, empty.
Maldrow points to a spot in a shadowy corner where the blurry image of a life jacket hangs on the plain wood wall. "There's where it was done."
The Chief bends forward, places his right index finger on the photograph, and draws it down slowly. "No wonder she lost hope."
Suddenly Maldrow recalls the Chiefs first assignment, the man he had described, as vicious as he was cunning, skilled in murder and evasion, despair like a dark wake following behind him. He could still recall the Chief's final words: "Depart now and restore the balance."
"Yes," Maldrow says.
"Then you know that..." the Chief begins, then stops as the barkeep moves toward the booth.
"What'll it be?" the barkeep asks when he reaches it.
"Same," Maldrow says.
The barkeep nods coolly, takes the glass, turns back toward the bar.
Maldrow watches as the bartender trudges down the aisle, his head slanted to the right, as if trying to get a better view of him, but slyly, without being noticed. When he is out of range, he looks across the table to where the Chief sits, facing him.
"You know that nothing can be allowed to interfere once the choice is made," the Chief continues.
Maldrow recalls Yenna's body floating in murky water only forty yards from the railway station. It turns slowly, the dark cord trailing at her throat, an abandoned corpse, Yenna, edging toward the riverbank, where it snags upon a floating branch and finally comes to rest. "Yenna," he says softly.
"Is there any danger of such a thing happening in Katherine's case?" the Chief asks pointedly.
Now Maldrow sees the young man as he moves ever deeper into the alley's darkness, knows the evil he had done, and the greater one he'd intended. "Not anymore," he says.
***
I stopped, suddenly struck by a way I might find to make Katherine's story even more intriguing to Alice, an element I could add to the mystery. "How odd," I said. "This young man that Maldrow's thinking about. The one moving into darkness. The one Maldrow seems to think might somehow interfere."
Alice watched me silently.
"I went over to where Katherine once lived," I told her. "A woman was there. We had a little talk and she mentioned a young man who'd once lived on Gilmore. His name was Ronald Duckworth."
Alice peered at me with razor-sharp acuity, and in the passionate involvement I saw in her eyes, I felt that I had surely done the right thing: Katherine's story, for all its weirdness and gore, was perfect for her.
"I found him living out by Potter's Lake," I continued. "And what he said had happened to him was strange. Someone had attacked him a few days before Katherine disappeared. A very bizarre attack, from the way he described it. He said it was like being stabbed and beaten and strangled all at once." I looked at Alice gravely. "It makes me wonder if Duckworth and this guy Maldrow just thought about are the same. And if it was Maldrow who attacked him."
"But why would he have done that?" Alice asked.
"Maybe because he thought Duckworth was going to interfere with..." I stopped, pondered the issue a moment, then said, "With their plan. Maldrow's and the Chief's."
"Their plan for what?" Alice asked.
"For Katherine," I answered.
I had meant all this as something added to our experience of reading Katherine's story together, an intriguing little supposition that upped the stakes a bit, but I suddenly saw the two stories come together in Alice's mind: the story Katherine was writing and the one she was living, so that at the instant she'd
feared for the fictional Katherine, she'd feared also for the real one, a sense of impending danger of imminent tragedy, of Katherine's helplessness in the face of it.
"But, of course, we don't know if they have a plan," I added.
Alice looked at me gravely. "Then let's go on," she said.
THEN
I opened the door and felt the odd force of a once-violent but now-dissipating power, like the aftershock of an explosion.
"Come in," I said, then stepped back and let Maldrow pass in front of me.
He took a seat and looked at me calmly, without speaking, like one long accustomed to stillness.
Watching him, I felt the exhausting nature of his labor, forever tracking down the ones who harmed us, who raped and murdered us, who stole our children and invaded our homes and claimed our space and in doing that took something essential from our lives, something that, in the aftermath of this damage, would always be missing.
"People believe that nothing gets in their way," I said. "That no one is coming for them."
Maldrow smiled softly. "But someone is," he said.
For a moment, he was silent, and during that silence, I felt a great sense of purpose take shape in me, unseen and unspoken, but becoming ever more real.
"What must I do?" I asked.
"Make others believe."
"Believe what?" I asked.
He touched my face. "Your story."
I put down the page, now persuaded that Maldrow would not turn out to be the dark figure I had earlier believed him to be, and thus that Katherine's story might have a considerably less-disturbing resolution than the dreadful irresolution that was the story of her life.
"Looks like I was wrong about Maldrow and the Chief," I said.
Alice glanced toward the window and looked out as if in search of some phantasmagorical version of Maldrow's dusty old sedan.
"I'm being moved," she said. "To a hospice." Her eyes drifted over to me. "They do that when there's no more hope."
I felt a dreadful pall settle over me, the full weight of her impending death. "Where?"
"Not far from here," Alice answered. She smiled softly. "I can go out, though. I don't have to stay in my room, the way I would if they kept me in the hospital. So maybe we could go somewhere, George."
"Where would you like to go?" I asked.
"Someplace in Katherine's story," Alice answered. "Someplace where something happened. Like you went to the places in your book."
"All right," I said. "We'll do that."
I expected that in the methodical way she did things, Alice would immediately tell me the place she most wanted to see, Gilmore Street or the grotto by the river, for example. But instead she leaned back in her pillow, and said, "Tell me a story about a place you went to."
There were scores of places that might have occurred to me, but when I looked into Alice's large, nearly motionless eyes, one place and story rose from all the rest.
"It was July in Granada," I began. "Very, very hot. My sister started vomiting, so my father and I left her and my mother in our steaming hotel room and hailed a cab. My father's Spanish wasn't great, but he explained the situation to the driver as best he could, that his daughter was very sick and that he needed to get to a pharmacy as quickly as possible."
Alice stirred slightly, and in the stirring, as I saw, winced painfully, then instantly lifted her hand. "No, it's okay," she said. "Go on."
"Well, it was a Sunday," I continued. "Most of the pharmacies were closed, so the driver had to race from one to another before he found one that was open. He finally found one, though, and my father went in and bought the medicine, and after that the driver took us back to the hotel. My father handed me the medicine and started to pay the driver. He pulled out some money and started peeling off bills, but the cab driver sat back and wouldn't take anything. 'Por que no? my father asked. 'Why not?' The driver looked at my father as if he knew nothing about life, for all his money and all the places he'd been and all his education. He just shrugged and said, 'Porque tengo hija.' 'Because I have a daughter,'"
I glanced toward the window, looked out into the darkness for a moment, then shifted around and faced Alice once again. "I wanted to tell my son Teddy that story," I said before I could stop myself. A sulfurous wave washed over me, dark and murky as the waters into which my son's body had been sunk. "But someone murdered him and got away with it, so I'll never even know what happened to him."
Alice looked at me piercingly. "But you imagine it, don't you? What happened to Teddy."
She was right. I had imagined Teddy's murder many times. The mush he had become by the time he'd been found had revealed nothing concerning the actual manner of his death, and because of that, a hundred different murders had unfolded in my mind: a little boy stabbed, strangled, shot, but before that terrorized, perhaps tortured. I had imagined him curled in a closet, strapped to a board, lashed to a pole, hung on a hook. Nothing had not occurred to me, no carefully prepared dungeon too dark for my imagination to penetrate, and in that slowly accumulating light, I had seen my son's blond hair eerily aglow, frail as a flickering candle. In my final vision, he was always in a basement, with small square windows covered in black plastic, always naked, inhumanly pale, already half a ghost, shivering in the cold, his arms tied behind the back of a splintery wooden chair. Always he turned to me in that building light, always he looked at me, always he asked me, Why didn't you come for me?
"Yes, I do." I shrugged. "Anyway, I'd wanted to tell him stories." I walked back to my chair, picked up the manuscript, thinking to read the next section.
"No, let's wait," Alice said. Her voice was quite weak, and her skin seemed to have drooped slightly, as if she aged by the hour. "Tomorrow we can read some more. I'll be at the hospice by then." She drew in a long, labored breath. "It's on Gladwell Street."
"I'll be there tomorrow evening."
She smiled, but the smile itself seemed quite heavy, a burden difficult to lift.
"I should probably rest now," she said.
Her energy had flagged noticeably during the last few minutes, but it seemed to me that it was more than her fading strength that had prompted her to ask that we not continue reading Katherine's story until the next day. She wanted to string out the tale, to slow our journey to its end, and by that means hold on to this last element of suspense life offered her.
"Okay," I said. "But tomorrow let's read at that little grotto by the river. Where Katherine disappeared."
"That would be nice, George," Alice said softly. "That would be a good place."
She added nothing to this, but only eased herself back into the pillow and closed her eyes, her body so small and motionless, sunk so deeply into the enclosing folds of the pillow, that by the time I got to the door and looked back at her, she seemed hardly to be there at all.
15
DRIVING HOME THAT NIGHT, I recalled the story I'd just told Alice, along with the dark circumstances under which I had told it, and in recalling both, felt myself strangely submerged in my own history, like a man deep beneath the waves, exploring caverns and old dead ships, not at all concerned that in all his earlier dives, something had been missed.
I remembered being frightened by gypsies in Portugal and the swarms of traders in Tangiers, and being saved by a man who'd appeared suddenly at a border station in Czechoslovakia and by whose near-miraculous intercession I'd managed to cross over into Poland on an otherwise-terrifying night. I remembered a rainstorm in the Carpathian Mountains and tramping among the northern fjords, the Terrace of the Infinite, night-bound Vienna, Max.
Then, quite suddenly, I remembered a time in Guadalajara, a fiery summer day, the little square deserted save for a single pigeon, its diseased feathers ruffled and untended, like a man with a bad haircut, and moving so crazily, with quick spins and abrupt halts, that I came to suspect that its tiny bird brain was like mine, disoriented by a heat so intense I'd later recalled it as physically visible, a scrim of infernal waves.
The pigeon took wing just as the man appeared, so that briefly they seemed simply to have exchanged shapes. He was probably the town lunatic, I'd thought later, the man who'd strolled with a vaguely dancing step into the square that afternoon, but I'd been only a day or two in Guadalajara, and so hadn't run across him before that steamy afternoon. He was dressed as a harlequin, in colorful tights and a cap with bells at its tips. It was the bells that had first drawn my attention, though their tiny tinkling sound would hardly have been audible if, at that moment, everything else had not been so deathly still. He'd brought a brightly colored wooden box with him, and after glancing about, he popped onto it with an airy, weightless leap, then on one foot began to twirl, full turn, then stop, each time repeating one of two phrases: Soy alegria. Soy tristeza. I am joy. I am sorrow.
Another's grim misfortune comes to us in many forms, but for some reason, driving back through Winthrop that night, recalling the madly spinning figure in that hellish square, I suddenly felt Katherine's tragedy as I thought Alice might think of her own; not as the product of some terrible confluence of events, but as something cruelly embedded within the scheme of things.
This was hardly a comforting thought, and I knew that in the way all such thoughts had done during the last seven years, it would finally bring me to Teddy, the promise I'd made to him, then broken, and that at last I would relive the moment of that promise-breaking, when I'd stood at the window, looked at the rain, seen a man in a yellow rain slicker, then turned away from the window and gone back to my little article on Extremadura, a line I couldn't finish, and had never finished.
It was a bleak, oft-repeated journey, the reliving of that moment, and I had no wish to make it yet again that night. Anything was preferable, even a high-toned book about a primitive tribe. I retrieved it from the little table beside my bed, walked to my desk, and read again of the seesawing spiritual life of the Buranni, sometimes in despair at their powerlessness before the "evil" Nemji Gai, sometimes hopeful of miraculous intervention on their behalf, realism at one end, superstition at the other, a perpetual imbalance I once again found vaguely disquieting, like a man who'd lost purchase, sought stability, but couldn't find it.