“Funny how your dad managed to forget to tell me this. Funny how he forgets to mention a lot of things.”
“It’s the way he controls people,” Zak said.
“Tell me about it. He was my big brother a long time before he was your father. So, you feel guilty because you arranged for Valencia Jones’ ski weekend. It’s wrongheaded thinking, Zak. How could you have known what would happen? It’s not like a drug bust was part of the discount package.”
“That’s cold comfort coming from you and pretty inconsistent. I’m either responsible or not responsible for my inability to foresee future consequences, but not both.”
“Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, Zak. But you’re talking tennis rackets and stickball bats here,” I chided. “When you made Valencia’s ski reservations, it was an innocent gesture. It would have been unreasonable to suspect anything more ominous than a broken leg to come of it. But there was nothing innocent in your dropping out of circulation. You intended for things to happen, you hoped for it. That’s manipulation. It’s the difference between the sun and a hydrogen bomb. Some chain reactions are natural and beyond our control, some are purposeful and man-made.”
Zak was stunned, absolutely silent, pained. Almost imperceptibly at first, his bottom lip quivered. Large tears poured over his cheeks. He did not bother to wipe them away. I think he literally wanted them to stain his face, to brand him a fool. But he did remain silent.
“I need to be alone right now, Uncle Dylan,” he finally spoke and let himself out of the shelter.
The symbolism of his exit was not lost on me. Sometimes the cost of our life lessons comes at our own expense. Sometimes other people have to pay. When they pay with their lives, reimbursement becomes problematical.
Smoke
I didn’t have the strength in me not to be happy to see John Francis MacClough. At that moment, I would have forgiven him more than murder. For John had always been magic for me. Though I couldn’t swim a stroke, I felt as if I was never in above my head with him about. I guess it was a silly attitude for a man of forty years to have. I realize the irrationality of it, but when he stuck his head through the shelter hatch, I felt as if I would be saved. Alas, my euphoria at the sight of him was short-lived, as his first words to me were: “You’re fucked, Klein.”
Even that could not ruin my mood entirely. MacClough had been a sort of ploughman’s guardian angel, the adopted older brother who could fulfill the promises my blood brothers could not. I had, in some unarticulated way, come to think of Johnny as the brother without the feet of clay. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d been wrong.
“Thanks, you shanty Irish prick,” I shouted, standing up to hug him. “I’m so fucked, I’m even happy to see your ugly puss.”
But when he stepped back from my embrace, his face was blank. Not cold, exactly, just blank. “You’re happy even though you think I’m a murderer?”
“The rest of the world thinks I’m one. I guess I got religion all of a sudden. Did the news reach home yet?”
“Not before I left, but I’d say the picture from your investigator’s license is probably hitting the airwaves all over North America about now. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume it wasn’t you that whacked the whore. Who did it?”
“She wasn’t a whore, MacClough. She was my fiancee.”
“Maybe we better back up.”
I agreed. “Maybe we better.”
Johnny sat down on the lower cot and listened carefully to what I had to say. He showed emotion only once, wincing at my description of Kira’s body-inert, nude, battered-hanging off the bed. It wasn’t the description of her body per se that pained him. I knew that. As a beat cop he’d seen human remains in all manner of horrific states. He used to say he’d found bodies that would make Jack the Ripper’s butcher puke. It was the loss at the chance for love that hurt him. Having let the one true love in his life slip through his fingers decades ago, he could not abide the loss of love. Sometimes, I thought, it was MacClough, not me, who possessed the soul of a writer. As an Irishman, he was born with it.
“Who did it, Klein?” he asked, turning away. “Who killed her?”
“It was either the desk clerk or the ski dude or both. I was thankfully unconscious at the time. What am I going to do, John?”
He didn’t answer and before I could push him for a response, Guppy came through the hatch with some beers in tow. MacClough said he preferred whiskey, but Guppy had none. He did not believe in alcohol. It clouded the mind, weakened concentration. The only reason he had beer was to appease Zak. It wasn’t a religious issue with him.
Finally, after Guppy had explained himself to death, MacClough begged for him to shut up and wondered if Gupta had ever met an indirect answer he didn’t like?
“No,” was all he said.
When the beers were finished, I bit my lip and asked Guppy to help us understand exactly what he and Zak were up to. It was all well and good, I said, that Zak disappeared, but what significance could that possibly have to a drug distribution ring. Why would a college kid’s dropping out of sight lead to three deaths and the destruction of a ski resort? Possibly out of fear of another long-winded explanation, MacClough spoke up.
“Zak knows something and the drug dealers know he knows. What’s more, Zak’s got proof of what he knows. That’s what they were looking for when they tore up Zak’s rooms and Caliparri’s house.”
Guppy’s face brightened: “That is essentially correct, but there is solidity at the center of your conclusions. At the center of our plan is smoke and void.”
So much for direct answers. MacClough and I found dread in each other’s eyes, but neither of us could see our way around asking the question.
“Can you run that by us in something akin to English,” I pleaded. Gupta pointed at MacClough. “Mr. MacClough-”
“John,” he interrupted. “It’s shorter.”
“Very well, John. John said that Zak knew something and that the drug dealers knew he knew. Furthermore, he said that Zak could obviously back up with physical proof these things he knew. But the truth is that Zak and myself know nothing about these drug operations. We only have guesses and we could no sooner prove any of those guesses than I could prove that this chair is what it seems.”
“What?” MacClough was agitated. “Klein, you’re fucked worse than I thought.”
“Perception,” I told John, “is everything. Perception is reality.”
“What have you two been smokin’? You sound like a couple of escapees from a bad philosophers convention.”
“Zak knows nothing,” Guppy said while laughing at John’s bad philosophers comment. “And I know even less. But through a certain dexterity with computers and a carefully planned timetable, Zak and I have been able-”
“-to leave a certain impression.” MacClough was catching on. “You mean you guys really don’t know anything.”
“Nothing. We only know that what we have done is working. The fire at Cyclone Ridge, the break-ins, the murders, and the attempt to frame Mr. Klein tell us that. We have stirred up the beehive, but we have only felt their sting. What we need to know is the bees themselves.”
“How’d you manage it?” I wondered.
Guppy sat down at the computer, got his system quickly up and running. His lithe brown fingers fairly glided along the keyboard, hesitating only briefly to afford him the opportunity to scan the monitor. Apparently satisfied, he turned his attention back to MacClough and myself.
“Do you know the Internet, gentlemen?”
We both nodded our heads that we did, but both Johnny and I were quick to point out that we knew very few of the details. MacClough didn’t even own a typewriter. Christ, he still used a rotary phone. And I pounded out my work on a temperamental Smith Corona word-processor. Neither of us had the hi-tech sensibility of a Generation X-er.