It was what you would expect—one of those tormented boys had come back to exact justice. He had wanted to forget what he had done—he hated the kind of man Stenmitz had turned him into. It was tragic. Decent people would put all this behind them and go back to normal life.
But I turned the pages of my scrapbook over and over, trying to find a phrase, a look in the eye, a curl of the mouth, that would tell me if William Damrosch was the man I had seen in the tunnel with my sister.
When I tried to think about it, I heard great wings beating in my head.
I thought of April sailing on before me into that world of annihilating light, the world no living person is supposed to know. William Damrosch had killed Heinz Stenmitz, but I did not know if he had killed my sister. And that meant that April was sailing forever into that realm I had glimpsed.
So of course I saw her ghost sometimes. When I was eight I turned around on a bus seat and saw April four rows back, her pale face turned toward the window. Unable to breathe, I faced forward again. When I turned back around, she was gone. When I was eleven I saw her standing on the lower deck of the double-decker ferry that was taking my mother and myself across Lake Michigan. I saw her carrying a single loaf of French bread to a car in the parking lot of a Berkeley grocery store. She appeared among a truckful of army nurses at Camp Crandall in Vietnam —a nine-year-old blond girl in the midst of the uniformed nurses, looking at me with an unsmiling face. I have seen her twice, riding by in passing taxis, in New York City. Last year, I was flying to London on British Airways, and I turned around in my seat to look for the stewardess and saw April seated in the last seat of the last row in first class, looking out of the window with her chin on her fist. I faced forward and held my breath. When I looked around again, the seat was empty.
9
This is where I dip my buckets, where I fill my pen.
10
MY first book, A Beast in View, was about a false identity, and it turned out that The Divided Man was also about a mistaken identity. I was haunted by William Damrosch, a true child of the night, who intrigued me because he seemed to be both a decent man and a murderer. Along with Millhaven, I assumed that he was guilty. Koko was essentially about a mistaken identity and Mystery was about the greatest mistake ever made by Lamont von Heilitz, Millhaven's famous private detective. He thought he had identified a murderer, and that the murderer had then committed suicide. These books are about the way the known story is not the right or the real story. I saw April because I missed her and wanted to see her, also because she wanted me to know that the real story had been abandoned with the past. Which is to say that part of me had been waiting for John Ransom's phone call ever since I read and reread the Ledger's description of William Damrosch's body seated dead before his desk. The empty bottle and the empty glass, the dangling gun, the words printed on the piece of notebook paper. The block letters.
The man I killed face to face jumped up in front of me on a trail called Striker Tiger. He wore glasses and had a round, pleasant face momentarily rigid with amazement. He was a bad soldier, worse even than me. He was carrying a long wooden rifle that looked like an antique. I shot him and he fell straight down, like a puppet, and disappeared into the tall grass. My heart banged. I stepped forward to look at him and imagined him raising a knife or lifting that antique rifle where he lay hidden in the grass. Yet I had seen him fall the way dead birds fall out of the sky, and I knew he was not lifting that rifle. Behind me a soldier named Linklater was whooping, "Did you see that? Did you see Underdown nail that gook?" Automatically I said, "Underhill." Conor Linklater had some minor mental disorder that caused him to jumble words and phrases. He once said, "The truth is in the pudding." Here is the pudding. I felt a strange, violent sense of triumph, of having won, like a blood-soaked gladiator in an arena. I went forward through the grass and saw a leg in the black trousers, then another leg opened beside it, then his narrow chest and outftung arms, finally his head. The bullet had entered his throat and torn out the back of his neck. He was like the mirror image of Andrew T. Majors, over whose corpse I had become a pearl diver for the body squad. "You got him, boy," said Conor Linklater. "You got him real good." The savage sense of victory was gone. I felt empty. Below his thin ankles, his feet were as bony as fish. From the chin up he looked as if he were working out one of those algebra problems about where two trains would meet if they were traveling at different speeds. It was clear to me that this man had a mother, a father, a sister, a girlfriend. I thought of putting the barrel of my M-16 in the wound in his throat and shooting him all over again. People who would never know my name, whose names I would never know, would hate me. (This thought came later.) "Hey, it's okay," Conor said. "It's okay, Tim." The lieutenant told him to button his lip, and we moved ahead on Striker Tiger. While knowing I would not, I almost expected to hear the man I had killed crawling away through the grass.
11
ON the morning of the day that John Ransom called me, I shuddered awake all at once. A terrible dream clung to me. I jumped out of bed to shake it off, and as soon as I was on my feet I realized that I had only been dreaming. It was just past six. Early June light burned around the edges of the curtain near my bed. I looked down from my platform over the loft and saw the books stacked on my coffee table, the couches with their rumpled covers, the stack of papers that was one-third of the first draft of a novel on my desk, the blank screen and keyboard of the computer, the laser printer on its stand. Three empty Perrier bottles stood on the desk. My kingdom was in order, but I needed more Perrier. And I was still shaken by the dream.