“There are many essential police skills they don’t teach you at the Academy,” said Pendergast. “Ass covering, as it is so charmingly termed, being the most important.”
21
He stood motionless in the humid darkness, all senses alert. He was aware of the faint breeze, now at last turning cool, as twilight became night, drying the perspiration on the nape of his neck. He was aware of various smells, some sharp and close, others farther away: crushed grass, roasting pork, diesel, salt water, cigar smoke. His mind tuned in the fragments of sound that enveloped him: the blatt of a boat horn, distant laughter, thumping bachata from a discotheque, angry acceleration of a motorcycle, screech of brakes. Most of all, he was aware of the light: at night, it seemed rare, precious — more real. You didn’t notice light during the day; you were immersed in it; you put on your sunglasses and ignored it. But at night it was different. Darkness was like the setting of a gemstone, and the qualities of light were as numerous as its colors: soft, low, intense, gauzy, tremulous. The sodium streetlamps; the high-rise stacks of light that were the hotels; the yachts whose mooring lights gleamed out of the velvety darkness of the creek. He was most comfortable in the dark, because he could become safe, invisible, and unnoticed. This anonymity was a cloak that deserted him in the day, and he had to guard against the resulting exposure. He had learned this long ago, through painful experience and through the Lessons. It was the dark, and the nonexistence it conferred, that made it possible to do his sacred duty — to complete the Action that was as necessary to him as breathing. Action... this moment of being a nobody wrapped in the night was the best time, when he could forget the shame and regret and be in the moment, his senses heightened without fear. While preparation was meticulous, the Action itself could never truly be predicted. Always there were variations, surprises. It was like poetry in that way; you never knew where a great poem would lead. It was like a battle in which the outcome was obscured in fog and smoke — the “poem as a field of action,” as William Carlos Williams wrote.
The running lights of a passing boat swept through the tree branches, and he pressed himself against the trunk, melting farther into the whispering darkness. The approaching Action made him think of Archy and Mehitabel, who lived in the deep, reinforced pockets of his cargo pants. As a child, before the Death and the Journey, he had read and loved the little books about Archy and Mehitabel, their humorous verses and stories — Archy, a free-verse poet who’d been reincarnated as a cockroach, and Mehitabel, a scruffy alley cat. He identified with them both. They were nobodies, too; vermin, despised by the world. But they had nobility, and it was right that he named his tools after them. They were his only friends. They never let him down. And in return he kept them clean and sharp, just as he had been taught in the Lessons, honing them until they could cut a hair. They would have gleamed brightly in the moonlight if he did not take care to blacken them after sharpening. Action would dull them soon enough, the warm gush of liquid rinsing away the black. Mehitabel usually came out first, her lone claw cutting so fast and smooth and deep there was no pain, only swift and merciful sleep. And then Archy would make his appearance. His wooden handle felt as much a part of him as his own arm. Archy, lowly though he was, carried the power of expiation. He could forget almost anything with Archy in his hand, even the Journey. As he grew older, his truth had become clearer and more bitter — and that was good, because bitterness and truth were the only reality. Because it is bitter. Just as his own heart had grown bitter with remorse.
But this was not a time to dwell on the past, but rather to stay in the present, to be as keen as Mehitabel; to be conscious of the sweat drying on his neck and the cigar smoke drifting in the breeze and the strange mechanical conversations of distant traffic: because now he realized the waiting was almost over and the Action was approaching; he could hear it and see it and he would soon even smell it and feel it. It would happen so quickly. There would be the Action first, and then next would come the thing, the sole thing that, one day, could — he hoped — make the pain and guilt and shame go away forever:
Atonement.
22
Agent Coldmoon was lounging on the queen bed of his room at the Holiday Inn Miami Beach, watching a rerun of The Dick Van Dyke Show and eating four packets of chocolate chip cookies he’d picked up from the vending machine in the lobby, when the telephone rang.
Coldmoon was not particularly a fan of the show — he had about as much in common with Rob Petrie and his ’60s suburban family as he did with a colony of Martians — but he always enjoyed predicting whether or not Van Dyke would trip over the ottoman during the opening credits. He waited a few seconds — ottoman successfully navigated this episode, just as he’d predicted — before picking up the phone.
“Yeah?”
“Special Agent Coldmoon?” It was Assistant Director Pickett.
Coldmoon reached over and muted the TV. “Yes, sir.”
“I’ve been expecting a call from you.”
Pickett liked having people phone him, rather than the other way around. Making Pickett reach out now and then was one of Coldmoon’s little private mutinies. “The flight was late getting in,” he said. “Then we had a meeting with the document examiner.”
“What happened in Ithaca?”
“We stopped by the local PD, picked up the case files, spoke to the woman at Cornell who’d interviewed Agatha Flayley, then got a tour of the scene from the first responder.”
“What about the motel she stayed in the night before she killed herself?”
“Torn down half a dozen years ago. Staff scattered to the winds. No records.”
“So basically it was the waste of time I predicted.”
“We haven’t finished going through the files.”
“You didn’t need to leave Miami to do that.” An exasperated sigh. “So you didn’t get any takeaway from the trip? Nothing at all?”
“No, sir, I—” Coldmoon hesitated, recalling Pendergast’s odd behavior on the bridge. That sudden catching of breath, as if he’d seen something, or put two pieces of a puzzle together.
Pickett jumped on the hesitation instantly. “What? What is it?”
“I think Pendergast is holding something back from me.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know. Some theory. A plan of action, maybe. Something crystallized for him today, up in Ithaca. At least, that’s how it looked to me. I can’t tell you any more than that.”
“Have you asked him about it?”
This was a stupid question, and Coldmoon didn’t particularly try to hide it. “You know Pendergast better than that. If he senses me doing any probing, he’s just going to withdraw further.”
“All right. Any sense of how this theory, or whatever, is going to manifest itself?”
“I just... sense that a storm is coming.”
“A storm? Good. In fact, it’s perfect.” There was a pause. “You’re right — I know Pendergast. Sooner or later he’s going to do something crazy. Something out of left field, or of questionable ethics, or even specifically against orders. So I want you to watch him, Agent Coldmoon. And when you think this storm is about to break, I want you to report back to me.”
Coldmoon moved restlessly on the bed. “Can I ask why, sir?”
“I thought we discussed this at the time you agreed to be his partner. I’m going to shut it down before it happens.”
“Even if whatever it is might help the case?”
“What will help the case is accomplishing things. We both know that if Pendergast can be relied on to do anything, it’s to veer off on some wild goose chase that wastes time and makes everyone look bad. That’s you and me, Agent Coldmoon. Look what happened with the Maine trip.”