"What kind of reputation?"
"The kind that gets you clients who pay in cash."
"What's your point?"
"I'm curious why that happens."
"Why?"
"Yeah. I'm curious why someone turns. I'm interested in the process."
"Are you asking hypothetically? Because that's the only way I can answer you. Mr. Goldblum was a client of the hospital. There are laws about that."
"Sure. Hypothetically. Hypothetically why someone who's up for the Nobel Prize ends up blackmailing queers."
"Hypothetically, you've got someone who grew up by the Golden Rules. Someone who, hypothetically, believed in them. Someone who was confronted with a horrible situation. Someone who still believed in them. Someone who acted on them. Someone who got sent to Mauthausen for acting on them. And the worst part-some- one who lost everything he loved for acting on them. Hypothetically, you've got someone who isn't so fond of the Golden Rules anymore. Someone who, hypothetically speaking, can't wait to get rid of them."
"Okay, that makes sense."
"And this kind of person wouldn't exactly be enamored with himself either."
"Why?" William said, remembering those pictures shot from boot high.
"He survived. They didn't."
They being one wife and two little tow-headed children.
"We coined a phrase," Dr. Morten said. "Survivor's guilt. We couldn't do much about it-but we gave it a name."
"Why couldn't you do much about it?"
"Why? Imagine yourself strapped in an airplane with your whole family. I mean everyone. Cousins, grandmothers, uncles and aunts, your wife and children. And then you crash. You don't just crash-you know you're crashing for a good ten or fifteen minutes. You feel the ground rushing up to meet you. You have to listen to everyone's cries and prayers and whimpers. You have to look into your children's eyes and see the future that'll never happen. And then, when the moment finally comes, when you finally crash, after you've said your goodbyes and wrapped your arms around your wife and children for the last time-surprise. You don't die. They do-all of them, while you watch them go one by one unable to stop it. But you-you're still there. Now," Dr. Morten said, "what do I tell you to make you feel better? What do I tell you to make you stop wishing you'd joined them?"
Yeah, William thought, remembering that little girl, okay, not quite the same thing. But still…
"We started our survivors program armed with good intentions. But they spoke a different language. We spoke a different language. They'd witnessed the inconceivable. Everything we said to them sounded like gibberish. We didn't have a prayer. And neither did they. The program was an unqualified failure. We cut it in thirds, then gave it up completely."
"And Jean. He was a failure too?"
"Sounds like it, doesn't it. Then again, he didn't shoot himself or throw himself off a bridge, so maybe not."
Maybe not. Only maybe he did throw himself off a bridge, only maybe it took him fifty-five years to hit the water. But at the very end of his swan dive, this close to oblivion, someone had reached out a hand and said salvation. But who?
"What will you do now?" Dr. Morten asked him. Other than leave my house-which he didn't say but which he didn't have to.
"Poke around a little more. You never know."
They both sat up, one just a little ahead of the other, though it was hard to say who was first and who was second. Call it a photo finish. Dr. Morten showed him halfway out, pointing the rest of the way like a waiter indicating the direction of the lavatory. William nimbly dodged cats, as nimbly as he could with a cane and arthritis-ravaged legs, which means he stepped on only two or three of them. Dr. Morten wasn't happy about that, and the screaming cats weren't exactly thrilled about it either. All the residents of the town house were pretty happy when he made it out the door.
Then this is what happened.
He walked, okay, limped a block or two. He passed two hot dog vendors who were just setting up.
He passed a black transvestite who asked him if he wanted a date.
A Lexus honked at him as he trudged across a crosswalk, then gunned the engine as he passed, belching out a cloud of rotten egg exhaust. William coughed, limped, coughed, limped. An acorn dropped on his head. A homeless man defecated in front of him. This is what happened. A news truck heaved a bundle of papers to the sidewalk, missing him by inches. Another vagrant yelled at him, cursing him with unbearable rage. A girl with tall bare legs walked right past him without seeing him. He figured out what had happened in Dr. Morten's house. He passed a stray German shepherd, then his limp slowed, became a shuffle, turned into a slight bobbing, eased into stillness. The shepherd barked. This is what happened. What was his name? Dr. Morten had asked him. Jean. Jean Goldblum. And then a cat had leapt across the table, throwing a shadow across Dr. Morten's face. And that was the problem-right there-that shadow. That was the problem. For he could picture it now: the leaping cat, the yellow bowl hurling milk, that shadow-like a still-life now, but one where everything's just off, the perspectives forced, the spatial relationships askew. The problem here was which had come first-the cat's shadow or the cat- and every time he looked at the picture it seemed to be the shadow when it should have been the cat. That was a problem all right, you couldn't account for it, or rather, you could account for it, but in only one way. And that way wasn't the way he was going, he was not going that way. For the only way you could account for that was this: that the shadow didn't belong to the cat at all, but belonged instead to Dr. Morten. That he may have gone to the file, but that he hadn't needed to. That the minute he'd heard that name, he'd known right off who it belonged to, known it so strongly and so immediately that darkness had touched his face like grief.
William had been looking the wrong way. But no longer. The way was that way, the way back.
Santini said every case Jean took was the same case and that the case was his own.
And that case was down in the files.
Now all he had to do was get a look at them.
TWENTY-TWO
Black bag jobs, hit-and-runs, in-and-outs. Santini had been the acknowledged master, Jean the unacknowledged one, and William the class virgin. After all, you didn't have to break in on adulterers when you could peek in on them. Which was just as well, since William, of course, played by the rules, and the rules said private investigators had no more rights than a private citizen and therefore couldn't go breaking into other people's houses. Santini and Jean treated this rule like they treated other people's houses, that is, they broke it, then broke into other people's houses. Santini even had enough time left over to break into other people's wives as well, which means he may have been the real master of the surreptitious entry after all.
William, then, was at a disadvantage. He'd picked up a flashlight at a local hardware store, as well as some black electrical tape, though he would have been at a loss to tell anyone why.
I don't know, Officer, he'd have to say, and unlike the other twenty thousand would-be burglars they'd pick up this week, he'd really mean it.
He whiled away the hours at a Burger King, a street- side flea market, and finally at a movie which starred Jean-Claude Van Damme, and which only one hour later he couldn't remember a single word from. Okay, he remembered a few words-the part where they explained native Alabamian Jean-Claude's accent as a residue from his attending summer camp in Switzerland. Drawp your weepon-he said, and this bunch of rednecks refused to, but only because they didn't understand what he'd said. That was William's guess, although they might have been just getting him mad so that Jean-Claude could do his stuff and litter their junkyard with their thoroughly beaten up bodies. William left the theater wishing he knew the martial arts, so he could simply drop-kick his way into Dr. Morten's rose-brick town house.