“What time is it?”
He looked at his wrist. “Two twenty-seven in the afternoon.”
“Lunchtime. “ I wiped the sleep from my eyes.
“Normally, yes, but because of the weather, I am finished for the day.”
I put my right hand out. “Thanks for saving me. Maybe we can talk about why you did it a little later.”
“We can do that.” He shook my hand. “Are you hungry?”
“For answers.”
“You and the police. That woman at the end of the aisle heard a news report on you when she arrived back at her flat.”
“I was afraid of that,” I confessed. “Were they rough on you?”
“Not at all.” He laughed. “I played the frightened immigrant, waving my hands and praising God. I’ve perfected it over the years. It’s gotten me out of a number of fixes. That day I met you in the coffee house, I was doing a variation on the theme. The wise Eastern philosopher, full of vague platitudes for anyone who will listen.”
“Who is the woman in the portrait?”
“Has she gotten under your skin already?” He smirked, then remembering the scratches on my face and the reason for my being here, he apologized. “That was unforgivable.”
“Forget it. Who is she?”
“No one, really. An ideal woman. She has come to me in my dreams for years. In exchange for some help I gave a friend, she painted that portrait from my description. It is quite good, that painting.”
I agreed. “Amazing.”
“I know she exists somewhere,” Guppy explained, tapping his heart. “She may look nothing like the portrait, but I will recognize her spirit.”
“I believe you will. So. .”
“So?” he puzzled.
“Where’s the computer? And please, don’t wave your hands around and praise God. I don’t give up so easy as the Riversborough Police.”
“You do have questions.”
“I’m just getting wanned up,” I said. “How is it you just happen to have Triple B in the fridge? And what is it you know about Zak you weren’t telling me that day at the coffee house? And how in the hell do you know I didn’t kill the girl?”
“Come, Mr. Klein, let me unburden your heart. The questions will answer themselves.”
I was getting a little tired of Guppy the wise philosopher and I would have appreciated a straight answer. Instead, I followed him down to the basement. We went into his little workshop. There was a workbench with some hand tools. There were shelves with rows of baby food jars used to store screws and nails and nuts and bolts. Unlike the furnishings upstairs, the shop was a bit dusty. Suddenly it occurred to me that this was the one place in the house that seemed not to fit. The furniture upstairs certainly wasn’t new, but it was modern, more or less. The tools on the workbench were wooden-handled, from another era. Even the baby jars seemed dated. I picked one up. The lid was the old-fashioned kind from when I was a kid, the type you had to pry off with a special tool.
“From the original owner,” Guppy said, sensing my curiosity. “And so is this.”
He reached down to the floor and unhinged some latches hidden behind the legs of the workbench. He stood and repeated the process with some other latches hidden in a storage cabinet. If you didn’t know they were there, you would never have noticed those latches. I got the feeling that that was the whole idea. Guppy tugged at one end of the workbench and it pulled off the wall quite easily. He pulled away a strip of old yellow insulation to expose what looked like a bulkhead door from a WWII submarine.
“If it’s not a U-boat,” I said, “it must be a bomb shelter.”
“Very good, Mr. Klein. A bomb shelter it is.”
Guppy unscrewed the heavy steel wheel, releasing the thick pins which sealed the door against nuclear attack. There was an audible gush of air as the seal was broken. He yanked the door open and stepped in before me, flicking on a light switch. He asked me to come in, but to wait as he pulled the workbench roughly back into place. When he had done so, he pulled the bulkhead door closed and spun the handle shut.
We were on a short flight of metal stairs surrounded by bare concrete. The concrete was probably a good foot or two thick. The light fixture was a simple steel cage fixed over a lightbulb. At the bottom of the stairs was another bulkhead door, only this one was more of a hatch than a door. Again, Guppy spun the heavy wheel to release the seal. Almost immediately, I could hear music coming from inside the shelter. I recognized the song, but not the band. It was a techno-pop version of the old Buddy Holly song, “Maybe Baby.” Guppy opened the hatch and pointed to a bar above it.
“Feet first,” he instructed as I grabbed the bar. “And, Mr. Klein, try to remember what desperation feels like to you.”
Some more vague advice to be shrugged off. I climbed through the open hatch. The music was louder now, but the room was black. Beneath the bassline of the music, I thought I could hear someone snoring. Guppy bumped into me as he came into the shelter. He apologized and before turning on the lights, said: “What we did, we did to save an innocent person. Our intentions were pure. You have to believe that. We could not foresee what would happen to the girl.”
“Look, I appreciate what you’ve done for me, but I’m really starting to lose my patience. Now what the fuck are you talking about?”
But Guppy did not have to answer. He did not even have to turn on the light. Because out of the blackness came the voice that would make it all clear to me.
“Hey, Uncle Dylan, is that you?”
Fairness
The lights came up, and, just for a moment, so did my heart.
Zak jumped down from the upper cot of two that folded off the wall. He kissed me, threw his big arms around me and bear-hugged me for a long few seconds. But my joy in discovering him alive had already gone out of me. I was stiff and numb in his grasp. He backed off, searching for clues in the lines and scratches in my face. Guppy stood silently behind me. The synthesized music droned on as Buddy Holly spun in his grave.
I turned to Guppy: “Fuck good intentions! Your road to hell is paved with innocent bodies.”
“He doesn’t know about her, Mr. Klein.”
“Who don’t I know about?” Zak was impatient.
“The girl who dug her nails into my face after she’d been strangled. Will you please shut that fucking music off?”
Guppy came around between Zak and me and flicked off the clock radio, which sat on a small shelf amidst the most impressive and relatively compact computer workstation I’d ever seen in a noncommercial setting.
“Who don’t I know about?” Zak repeated.
“Please,” Gupta implored, “give us a chance to explain.”
“Explain!” I was screaming. “You want to explain? Here, schmuck, let’s go find a phone. Either one of you two fluent in Japanese?”
Zak shrank back. “Japanese!”
“That’s right, Zak, Kira’s dead, thanks to you two clowns. You get on the phone and explain it to her father, because I couldn’t give a shit about what either of you has to say. If you want to play God, become a writer. Otherwise, omnipotence is best left in the hands of puppeteers and lunatics.”
Zak was crying.
Guppy fought back: “We were trying to save-”
“-Valencia Jones. I know that,” I said. “You’ve traded Kira’s life for hers. I sure as shit hope she’s worth it.”
“She’s innocent,” Zak yelled. “She’s innocent!”
“Maybe she is, but she’s still on trial and I’m next. How could you jerk everybody around like this? You missed Grandpa’s funeral. Your whole family is sick. For chris sakes, Zak, they think you’re dead! I thought you were dead!”
“I didn’t know how else to get anyone’s attention,” Zak said sheepishly. “Valencia was going to jail for a long time and no one would listen.”
“Oh, you got peoples’ attention, all right. Your father hired a Castle-on-Hudson detective to look into Valencia’s case. I figure his funeral was probably yesterday. Then there’s this guy, Steven Markum, he worked up at Cyclone Ridge. He was probably the guy that planted the Isotope in Valencia Jones’ car. He conveniently broke his neck skiing the other day. Cyclone Ridge is burning down as we speak. Your dorm room and room at home were both ransacked. The best friendship I ever had is probably over. I’m wanted for murder. And let’s not forget to throw Kira’s body on top of the pile like a cherry on top of a sundae. Yeah, Zak, I’d say you got people to listen.”