“You must have mentioned it to me.”
“And yet, I didn’t,” Tom said.
William’s scalp tightened. “Never mind. We don’t have to talk about this.”
“We don’t have to do anything,” Tom said, his voice louder. “We all have choices. So what I’d like to know is why you chose to end up in my studio on a day I’m teaching, and why you somehow found your way into a folder that I’m not showing anyone.” Now he was almost thundering. “How does a man come to be in a place like this, looking at things he shouldn’t?” He paused, as if at the top of a hill, and then started down it. “And not looking at them alone, either.”
Silence sealed the room. William sat down. “Oh,” he said. “That. It’s not happening anymore.” He paused.
“I’m not going to say anything to Lou or anyone else,” Tom said. “It doesn’t matter to me who you spend your time with. What does matter to me is what you’re saying right now.”
William struggled for a foothold. “But you were there that morning, right? In the studio?”
“I was looking for something,” Tom said. “I found it and I was gone from there by noon. When was the fire? Early evening?”
“I don’t know.”
“That might be useful information when you’re building a case,” Tom said. He picked up a brush, pointed the handle at William. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore. The next time we meet, let it be under better circumstances.” He turned his back on William, lifted the brush to his canvas, left it there to make a growing point. When William’s hand was on the doorknob, he spoke again. “And count yourself lucky that there will be a next time,” he said. “I don’t know if I should feel proud or ashamed that I’m letting you get away with acting reckless like this.”
“Like I said, it’s not happening anymore.”
“Not that,” Tom said. “I mean the way you treated me.” He turned back to the canvas and painted a horizontal line that ran to the end of the canvas, where it went straight down along the edge. William went out to sit in his car and wonder what he had done — or rather, why he had done it. He had misread the available evidence and then perpetuated the delusion just because it shone brighter than everything around it. It was a distraction from the blunt, dull expanse of the rest of his life. Without Emma, he had entered a kind of poverty. The currency was energy, and he was not able to hoard it or spend it. He turned on the radio and left it tuned between stations, trying to make out the words that bobbed to the surface of the static.
Four days later, out in Jerroldtown, police surrounded the home of a sixty-two-year-old retired professor named Thomas Lareaux, who promptly came to the front door with a gun. Lareaux fired at an officer, who fired back. Wounded, he fell to the ground. He was arrested and placed in an ambulance. One wall of his small house, according to a department spokesperson, was papered over with photographs of the buildings that had been set on fire over the past months, including the bus station, the hardware store, Sunny Isles Marina, and the East Side warehouse. The car dealership and Birch Mutual were not among them. Lareaux drove a blue pickup truck, said an undercover policewoman, who may well have driven a black Pontiac.
Lareaux was scheduled to be arraigned Thursday afternoon. William cut short his meeting with Wallace out at the lot and picked up Christopher at school. “Special unplanned stop,” he said.
“Okay,” Christopher said.
“We are going to see a master criminal of our time,” William said.
“Okay,” Christopher said.
They joined a knot of people at the base of the courthouse steps, at first only about a dozen, but then twice that, and then they were at the center of a lake whose shore was receding. The first police car that pulled up discharged a young black man, who passed the crowd without incident. The second contained Lareaux.
The gunshot had winged him in the left arm, and he wore a sling, which made him easy to spot. He was escorted by a policewoman toward the crowd, and voices went up as he approached: jeering voices, scornful voices, but also curious ones. “Why did you do it?” one woman said. Her tone had an unimaginable innocence.
Lareaux wore glasses in life, but they had been taken from him, and he stared obtusely into the crowd with sad, far-wandering eyes. “I have a political agenda,” he said. “Those who think they are in power must be taught otherwise. We are too beholden to self-appointed masters. We must tear them down.” The papers had uncovered their own rationale: Lareaux had a grown son who had been in and out of mental facilities his whole life; he had worked at four of the sites and been fired from three of them. The names of his son’s former supervisors were neatly lettered beneath the photographs on his wall.
A man from the rear of the crowd ran out and tried to shove Lareaux. “I had a friend you almost killed,” he said. “If he’d been on time to work, who knows what would have happened?” Someone else flung a paper cup filled with ice at Lareaux’s head. Then, suddenly, a section of the crowd surged forward. William was jostled. He caught sight of Christopher taking an elbow from a big man bumped by an even bigger one; the boy went down into the middle of the lake of people. A young woman, also teetering, stepped on Christopher’s hand, and William heard him cry out in pain. When a space opened up, Christopher was gone.
The woman who had stepped on him was following Lareaux up the courthouse stairs, yelling now. William went up the steps too. He tried to get an elevated vantage. He looked at his side of the street, at the other side. He checked both corners. Christopher was nowhere to be found. William called his name and waved, first one hand and then both, already imagining the news report: the missing boy had been in the company of his mother’s friend, who was unemployed as a result of a workplace assault.
Lareaux was inside now, and the people who remained on the stairs were yelling at each other. William paced from one edge of the courthouse to the other until he saw Christopher, or at least a spot that was the same deep green as his shirt, sitting on a bench far down the block.
He hurried over.
“I didn’t know where you went,” Christopher said, his voice thin with panic.
“I didn’t go anywhere,” William said. “You did.”
“Not my fault,” Christopher said. He was pressing his right thumb into the center of his left palm. William moved it aside and found a deep bruise. The ridge of the palm was swollen. “It’s fine,” Christopher said, trying to hide the hand behind his back.
“We should get it X-rayed to make sure it’s not broken.”
“But it’ll be okay?”
“What do you think?” William said, but he was asking, not telling, and he could see that Christopher could see that. And so William said yes. When they pulled up in front of the house, Christopher said nothing, just took his backpack with his good hand and dragged it behind him up the front path.
Tom came over that night, unannounced, the anger of the previous week evaporated, and joined William and Louisa in front of the television for what they all knew was the end of the line, in a sense. They ordered food and watched footage of the courthouse riot, and Tom said he thought he saw William, and William said he hadn’t even gotten out of his car, and Louisa said he should have gotten as close as possible, that things like that didn’t happen every day, and then the news was on to sports, and Louisa switched off the set and started picking up plates, and Tom left, and the two of them sat there in silence and William watched his wife, wondering what would happen next.
Karla called for lunch. “Tomorrow,” she said crisply, not quite asking. When William arrived at the restaurant, she was sitting, menu already closed.