“Even better. Adds to the myth. The recluse completely out of touch, shunning the new technology. We’ll build you up like those Japanese living in island caves who think the war’s still on. Maybe you’ve even gone insane…”
“There’s nothing wrong with me.”
“Let me worry about that. You stick to the books. Later.”
Ralph put down the phone. “Unbelievable.”
It rang again.
“Hello?”
“I thought I told you not to answer the phone.”
“I didn’t know we had started yet.”
“We have.”
“Sorry.”
“While I’ve got you on the line, I want you to grow a beard. And start getting drunk in public.”
“I thought I wasn’t supposed to go out…”
“You can for that. It’s pretty important.”
“Anything else?”
“Do you think you can get arrested? I mean, do you know any local cops, some minor thing where you can arrange beforehand to get out immediately on bail? Do you have any drug connections?”
“Tanner—”
“I’m just thinking out loud now. I’m excited. Are you excited? Because I’m excited. Later.”
Click.
7
Bok Tower stands 205 feet upon the highest point in peninsular Florida. It is an unforgettable sight, a stone monument rising alone on a pristine ridge called Iron Mountain, near the center of the state.
“The Singing Tower,” as it is known, features a fifty-seven-bell carillon, the centerpiece of the tranquil Bok Tower Gardens, a meditative retreat of unmatched serenity.
A car engine roared. People screamed. Tires squealed. A beat-up pink Cadillac convertible patched out of the parking lot. Serge and Lenny turned around in the front seat and looked back at the two young women called City and Country as they ran and yelled through a dust cloud, trying to catch the Cadillac as it pulled back on the highway and sped off.
“Hated to ditch them like that,” said Lenny.
“They left us no choice,” said Serge.
“Our sanity had to come first,” said Lenny, pushing the gas all the way to the floor, watching the women grow smaller in the rearview mirror.
“They never stopped talking,” said Serge. “I couldn’t hear myself think.”
“They were smoking up all my weed.” Lenny held a can of Cruex to his eye to gauge the damage. “And they were starting to get fat.”
“Of course they were getting fat — they never stopped eating. I thought I was watching some kind of unnerving nature special on the Discovery Channel, constrictor snakes dislocating their jaws to ingest small mammals headfirst.”
“That’s what the munchies do to you.”
“I’m glad I was never part of the drug culture,” said Serge, loading an automatic pistol in his lap.
“This isn’t about the drug culture — it’s about women,” said Lenny. “Oh sure, it always starts with a lot of Technicolor orgasms, and the next thing you know you got matching dishes in your apartment…”
“If we let them stay, pretty soon they’d be telling us what to do…”
“Making us wipe our feet…”
“Getting mad at us all the time for things we do not understand…”
Serge and Lenny looked at each other and shook with the heebie-jeebies.
“Still, I’m disappointed we had to leave the tower so fast,” said Serge. “I haven’t been to Bok since I was a kid.”
“You’re really into this history stuff, aren’t you?” asked Lenny, lighting a joint.
“Fuckin’-A. Built by Dutch immigrant Edward W. Bok, who dedicated it in 1929 to all Americans.”
“Nice gesture,” Lenny said through pursed lips.
“Guess what publication he was editor of.”
Lenny shook his head.
“Ladies’ Home Journal.”
“Get outta here.”
“I shit you not. And guess who he had write for him?”
Lenny shook his head again.
“Rudyard Kipling and Teddy Roosevelt.”
“Not too shabby,” said Lenny. “But how do you find out all this stuff? How do you remember it?”
“I assign each fact a geometric shape and then string them together in a crystalline lattice in the image center of my brain.”
Lenny exhaled a hit and nodded. “Works for me.”
“You see the funky colors in the masonry?”
Lenny nodded, although he didn’t know what masonry was.
“Pink and gray marble from Georgia and native coquina rock from St. Augustine,” said Serge, shaking the geopositioning tracker.
“What’s it say?” asked Lenny.
“The signal’s fading in and out, but it’s consistently pointing east, so the transmitter in the briefcase must still be working.” He put the tracker down on the seat beside him. “I’m pretty hacked I didn’t get to the gift shop. You know I’m always required to buy an enamel pin for my archives.”
Lenny reached in his shirt pocket and pulled out a Bok Tower lapel pin. He turned it back and forth to glint in the sunlight before passing it across the front seat.
“You’re humble and lovable,” said Serge. He removed a small plastic box from the gym bag at his feet and tucked the Bok pin inside with dozens of other pins.
“What are those?” asked Lenny, glancing over.
“Recent acquisitions. Sea World, Silver Springs, plus lots of train stuff, like the Flagler Museum.”
“Trains?”
“Yeah, I kind of got into them a little bit last year, because of the direct linkage to Florida’s evolution.”
“You? Getting into something a little bit?” said Lenny. “More like you completely obsessed, right?”
“I like to call it disciplined study habits.”
“I don’t buy it,” said Lenny.
“Neither did the cops.”
“You were arrested again?”
“It’s so unfair,” said Serge. “All these misunderstandings happening to the same person. What are the odds?”
“How did it happen?”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Serge, reaching in the glove compartment and taking out novelty glasses with 3-D spirals on the lenses and little pinholes in the middle.
Lenny looked over at him. “You going to do a flashback?”
Serge nodded. “I’m all about flashbacks.”
He slid the glasses on his face and raised his chin in concentration. “I can see it like it was just yesterday — a warm summer morning, the overnight dew burning off fast, mixing with the smell of just-mowed grass. A dark blue Buick LeSabre drove slowly down Cocoanut Row on the island of Palm Beach…”
Inside the Buick, two retired women sipped coffee from travel mugs. The passenger read the Palm Beach Post to the driver: an update on the “Spiderman” burglary trial out of Miami, then the arrest of a man who was looking up women’s dresses in Burdines with a videocamera concealed in the toe of his shoe.
“Must have been a small camera,” said the driver.
“Technology,” said the passenger, turning the page.
They took a left on Whitehall Way, toward a sprawling lawn and twin palms flanking a tall iron arch. The two museum volunteers parked and unlocked the gate, then the front door of a century-old mansion. They flipped on lights, adjusted the thermostat, opened the gift shop. One headed outside through the south door. There was an old banyan tree near the seawall, overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway and the mainland, where the servants lived in West Palm Beach. In the middle of the lawn was a brief stretch of railroad track that led nowhere. On the rails sat a forest green Pullman passenger car custom-built in 1886. There were historical plaques and gold letters down the side. Florida East Coast. And a number, 91. The woman climbed the steps at the end of the car and unlocked the door on the observation platform. She walked through the dining room, then down a narrow hallway past the copper-lined shower. She got to the sleeping compartment and froze in the doorway.
One of the pull-down sleeping berths was open, holding a pile of blankets covering a human-sized lump.