I drove on and, for a wild stretch of seconds, there was nothing but the sound of sirens and the flashing red and the hood of the Tempo crashing endlessly through the wall of night.
Then one siren changed pitch and the first cruiser zigged out to the side and overtook me.
“Pull over! Stop the car and pull over!”
The voice from the cruiser’s loudspeaker was like a thunder god’s. I glanced that way and saw the side of the cop’s car edge closer to mine. If I tried to outrace him, he would dash ahead and cut me off. If I tried to swerve and avoid him, I would lose control and die. There was no choice. I took my foot off the gas.
The Tempo’s speed broke at once. The car slowed quickly. The cruiser slipped ahead of me. Sidled in front of me, filling my windshield with red light. I saw its brake lights flare and glanced into my mirror to see the second cruiser pulling in tight behind me.
“Thank God,” Mrs. Russel said with a breath.
I hauled the wheel to the left and stomped down on the gas. The Tempo shot forward. Its front fender sliced away from the lead cruiser’s rear, found a wisp of empty air and dove into it, pulling past the cops’ left side. We were sucked into the dark road ahead and I was in front of them again. I was shooting away.
“Shit, you’re crazy!” Mrs. Russel roared.
I pushed the Tempo back up to its limit. The cop cars shuddered, then howled into pursuit behind me.
“You’re a crazy man!”
“They’ll stop us!” I screamed.
And, without thinking, I turned to look at her.
She was pushed so far back into her seat that she seemed to be trying to meld with it. Her face, slapped by the flashers as the cruisers closed in, was pulled taut, wrapped tight around a high-pitched scream.
“Watch out, watch out, watch out!” she cried.
I was already turning back to the windshield, following the white line of her wide-eyed stare. It seemed to take forever, that turning back. I could feel my head go round and the slow throb of the ache inside my head, and the weight of the alcohol squatting on my brain, and the weariness in my arms and legs, the pain behind my eyes-I could feel all of it in the slim edge of an instant. And I was aware of the first cruiser pulling up beside me again, the other car drilling through the little distance to my rear. I saw a splash of searing brightness ahead of me. I heard Mrs. Russel let fly a mindless yell.
And then the Tempo burned over the straight edge of the boulevard and tore full speed, shrieking, into Dead Man’s Curve.
2
It would be nice to think Frank Beachum had some vision at the end. In that last quarter of an hour, say, as the minute hand edged up over the closing arc of the hour’s circle. It would be nice to think some revelation came to him, some solid piece of understanding. Christ, say, might’ve floated beneath the fluorescent lights with open arms. The heavens might have opened and angels sung. Or, more believably, in those final fifteen minutes, in the maw of death, an incomprehensible but perfect calm of faith and understanding might have washed over his soul like warm bathwater. Although, in that case, I guess, someone would’ve seen him smile.
So maybe he had a more modern, more literary, vision, though Frank was not a modern, not a literary, man. Still, you know the kind of thing I mean: the moments might have stretched out until he realized each one was eternal, or Life might have revealed itself to him in pristine clarity until he saw that it was perfect as it was, and everything was All Right, if one only knew it. I don’t know what-all; that shit’s in books; you can read them.
But if you’re interested in the impressions of this reporter-and I guess you are, you’ve gotten as far as this-I would say that none of these visions, these clotures, were written in his eyes, and none were going on in his mind. He had, I think, in the end, reached that stage of fear in which self-awareness is gone and the entire body-and the soul too, if you want-becomes an organ of perception, sensation meditating on sensation. Frank had not gone mad or anything. Life had not been merciful enough to send him mad. But he wasn’t thinking either, not the way we think of thought. He was seeing, merely: seeing the rough ridges between the white cinderblocks of the wall, seeing the clock and the sweep of the hands over the circle of the clock, the faces hovering over him, Luther, Maura, the guard, the saline running invisibly through the clear tube into his arm-he was turning his eyes from one of these to the next unable to stay with any because each successive sight ignited in him that instinctive jolt of horror that a serpent would, for instance, if you suddenly found it in your cereal bowl. So he was seeing, and he was feeling fear, there on the gurney in the small, white room. And, at the same time, or in the minuscule interstices, he was remembering; not in words or jointed impressions-but in bursts of sensation: the smell of grass, the worry lines at the corners of Bonnie’s mouth, the gush of blood and matter in which his Gail had squeezed from between her mother’s legs, the heat of summer, the taste of beer-these memories hatched and vanished in his head in the split seconds between the sight of one thing and the next, and with each he was immersed in a bottomless depth of sorrow, a vast subaqueous plain of loneliness and mourning.
And that was all for him. The warden, after a word to the guard, was stepping out of the room now to greet the witnesses behind the wall. His deputy, Zach Platt, was in the corner, murmuring into his headset. The guard stood with hands folded over his chest, gazing down speculatively at the condemned man beneath his sheet. And Frank lay there waiting as the circle of the hour moved toward completion, his eyes darting, his body held motionless by the thick leather straps. Whatever attempts he might once have made to understand his life, his death, were over now. And for Frank Beachum, at eleven forty-five that Monday night, there was nothing but memory and terror and sadness-and the things that happened.
For Mr. Lowenstein, on the other hand, there was Debussy. “Clair de lune,” to which he had always been partial. He had it playing softly on the CD player and the clear, watery lilt of the piano made a mellow background noise in the small sitting room where he liked to work at night. It was a good place to work. He had his wing chair there, with the muted floral upholstery, and the low antique ottoman on which his slippered feet could rest. There was a small Persian rug on the floor, nicely faded, and a dainty escritoire by the window with pigeonholes for his writing supplies. There were books-the wonderful, muted colors of the bindings of old books on every wall. And Mrs. Lowenstein was there, bent over her needlework in an old-fashioned armless sewing chair, silent but companionable.
The owner and publisher of the St. Louis News was a tall, fit man in his sixties, with a full head of coiffed, silver hair. He had a grave, sage, handsome face, deep-browed and not unkind. He was working now in his wing chair with a Mont Blanc pen on a yellow legal pad. He had never used a word processor in his life and did not intend to. He was writing a letter to his employees, offering his thoughts and condolences on the tragic death of Michelle Ziegler, one of their own. He had already written a letter to the family, and a special note for the editorial page. Both of them had taken him a long time to finish.
This letter too was not an easy chore. Mr. Lowenstein was a scrupulously honest man and he had not liked Michelle very much. He had kept her on staff-as he had kept me-because Alan defended her, and he trusted Alan to the core. For himself, he thought she was a supercilious and unpleasant person, much too full of herself for one so young. At the same time, he felt that his personal likes and dislikes didn’t amount to very much now, at the end of things. So he was choosing his words with kindness and generosity-though, still, with a niggling regard for the truth.