Читать книгу Coyote Fork - James Wilson - Страница 9

5

NO RESPONSE FROM STEWART CROTHERS by the time I went to bed. No response when I woke up in the morning. The journalistic doldrums, Anne used to call it, when you’ve asked for an interview, and don’t know whether or not you’ve got it. A Yes will fill your sails and carry you forward; a No will leave you scanning the horizon for a rescue boat.

While I was waiting, I decided to research the man. It turned out there was frustratingly little about him. He’d been a contemporary of Evan Bone at Stanford, where he’d first mooted the idea of Global Village. After one semester he’d left university and started writing algorithms for the stock market. A year later he discovered that Evan Bone had taken the Global Village concept and was developing it himself. Crothers sued, and settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. Shortly afterwards, he retired from the tech world to concentrate on his first love, painting. He was now a virtual recluse, living in an isolated house at La Crema, on the California coast. There were a few muzzy photos of him. That was about it.

Virtual recluse. That didn’t sound encouraging.

I looked at my emails again. Still nothing. What had I expected? The truth was, I was still in that strange limbo between two different realities. The half of me—let’s call it Part A—that believed I’d seen Anne, and that this was all part of some grand plan, clung doggedly to the conviction that I’d get a reply. Part B—the half that still resisted the idea—was equally certain that it was a lost cause.

I decided to give it twenty-four hours. My rental car was due back at San Francisco airport the next day. If I’d heard nothing by then, I’d regretfully have to give up and take the next flight home. In the meantime, I should get a bit closer, so that I had less of a drive in the morning.

I made my way back to the freeway and headed south. I turned on the radio, hoping for some company, but succeeded only in unleashing an unending stream of ads for things I didn’t want: divorce advice (too late, sadly); second-hand cars at give-away prices; a night to remember at the Win-River resort. Searching for a bit of meat among the bones, I momentarily took my eye off the road and swerved on to the hard shoulder. A huge bull-necked truck thundered past with a bad-tempered bellow.

As I pulled back out into its wake, I glanced in my rear view mirror and saw a police motorbike a few vehicles behind me. The next time I looked, it had overtaken the intervening cars and was immediately behind me. I speeded up. It speeded up. I slowed. It slowed. Then it surged forward, blue lights flashing. I edged over and stopped. The motorbike followed. A burly cop dismounted and walked unhurriedly towards me. I rolled down my window.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I got distracted there for a second. I’m fine. Honestly.”

He lowered his head and peered into the car. He was wearing a black helmet, with a microphone fixed in front of it like Bob Dylan’s mouth organ. His wraparound dark glasses made it impossible to gauge his expression.

“Is this your vehicle, sir?” The gamey smell of his breath was half-disguised by a whiff of gum.

“No, it’s a hire car.”

“May I see your ID?”

I started to reach for my wallet.

“Uh-uh!” A gun suddenly appeared: a bulging black brute, like an outsized water pistol. He angled it towards me. “Hands where I can see them.”

“My license is in my pocket.”

“All right. Slow. No sudden movements.”

I inched my fingers inside my jacket and extricated my driving license.

“British, huh?”

I nodded.

“Passport?”

“It’ll mean moving my hands again.”

“OK. Real slow.”

I took out my passport. He studied it, then—still keeping the gun on me—took a few steps back and recited the number into his microphone.

“OK,” he said, after a few seconds. He lumbered over to me again. “Says your ESTA authorization expires in one week.”

“I know. But I’m all right till then, aren’t I?”

I held my hand out for the passport. He ignored it.

“And the address you gave when you entered the country was in San Francisco.”

“Yes. I’m on my way back there now. I just made a short trip up to Riddick.”

“What you doing in Riddick?”

“Visiting a friend.”

“What friend?”

“Look, can you tell me what this is about? What—”

“Just answer the question please, sir.”

“Mrs. Voss.”

“Ginny Voss?”

“Yes.”

“You’re a friend of Ginny Voss?”

“We know each other slightly.”

“How’s that?”

“Life’s rich tapestry. The warp and weft of destiny.”

He sighed. Don’t try to bullshit me.

“I heard about her daughter. I wanted to express my condolences.”

He removed his dark glasses. His blue eyes were wide with incredulity.

“I suffered a similar loss myself recently,” I said.

He stood back and looked appraisingly at my clothes, like a parrot eyeing some oddity in its cage.

“You going to a wedding someplace? Or a funeral?”

I shook my head. “This, believe it or not, is how I usually dress.”

He put his glasses back on. “I need to see your rental agreement for this vehicle.”

“Why? Do you think I stole it?”

“Please, sir—”

“Or do I look like a terrorist?”

“You should be careful what you say, sir. The rental agreement.”

“It’s in the glove compartment.”

“Put one hand on your head for me. Then nice and easy.”

“Why don’t you just get it yourself?”

“I can’t do that, sir.”

It was a ridiculous exercise, like a children’s game—except that children’s games aren’t normally played at gunpoint. None of my previous visits to America—though admittedly most of them had only been to New York or Boston or New Orleans—had involved a run-in with the police. But I’d heard the usual stories, and they weren’t reassuring. Had I just been unlucky on this occasion, or had somebody reported me to the Riddick Police Department for some reason? And, if so, who? Corinne Ramirez? Ginny Voss? The people at the hotel? There was no one else who knew where I was.

The policeman scanned the agreement, following the lines with his finger. “You only have one more day,” he said finally.

Well-spotted. I nodded.

“You have a plane reservation?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, my advice to you, sir, is that you return this vehicle and take the first flight you can get on.” He handed me my passport and the agreement. “And try to stay out of trouble till then. Have a good day.”

He turned and sauntered back to his motorbike, stuffing the gun into his holster.

“So what was that about?” I said, as I re-joined the traffic heading south.

But Anne, if she had been there at all, had taken me at my word and made herself scarce. Even so, for the rest of the journey, I couldn’t help thinking how she would have graded my performance if she had seen it. I’d have been lucky if she’d given me five out of ten. I hadn’t been entirely craven—but I hadn’t distinguished myself by my courage, either. Why hadn’t I challenged the man more robustly? Said I’d show him nothing until he told me why he’d stopped me? Refused to answer questions unless there was a lawyer present? I made it back to the Bay Area without further problems—but the whole way there, the pall of humiliation slumped on my shoulders like a damp coat.

I stopped at an-out-of-the way motel with a faulty Vacancy sign and a battered notice on a pole saying, C EAP RATES. I seemed to be the only guest, but the man behind the desk processed me as perfunctorily as if I’d been a delivery of Coke. On my way to collect my luggage I glanced back at him, just to make sure that he hadn’t waited for me to leave before picking up the phone to report my arrival. He was leaning back, hands behind his head, staring with a bored expression at his computer. Obviously, if someone was keeping tabs on me, they hadn’t bothered to alert him.

I had just got to my room when I heard my phone ping. I took it out. A text:

Tmrw 2 pm 8761 oceanview rd latham. stew crothers

I’d all but written him off. In my mind I was already packed, bags checked, waiting to board. Now, suddenly, an alternative had appeared. After my encounter with the Riddick Police, I wasn’t ecstatic about it. I could simply pretend his text had never arrived and carry on as planned. It would be easy enough. Or was this a last opportunity for me to redeem myself from the lingering charge of cowardice?

An image of myself if I didn’t take it suddenly unfurled before me. Me as a prematurely old buffoon, reduced to nothing more than—at best—a colorful anachronism, like one of the war-bonneted Indians in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Me propping up the bar somewhere, bending the ear of anyone who’d listen about the glory days of my career—oh, yes, a marvelous little place in the Indian Ocean—then lurching home and passing out in an alcoholic stupor on the bed.

No.

I pushed Reply and wrote:

Thanks. OK. See you then.

Only after I’d pressed Send did it occur to me that I hadn’t given him my phone number. So how on earth had he got it?

I was careful—or at least as careful as I could be, without knowing exactly what I was up against. In the morning, I went to the airline desk in person to change my ticket. Instead of extending the rental on the Charger, I returned it and skipped round the corner to a rival company to hire its replacement: a silver Toyota, which I thought was probably about as inconspicuous as you could get in this part of California. No GPS: too easy to trace. So my first stop was at a drugstore, where I bought a large-scale road map and a cheap Pay As You Go mobile. I asked for them in my best American accent. It was a bit shaky in places—but if the assistant who served me noticed, he gave no sign of it.

After transferring Corinne’s, Ginny Voss’s and Stewart Crothers’s numbers to the new phone, I removed the battery and SIM card from the old one and stowed it at the bottom of a suitcase. Then I opened the atlas and plotted my route.

Latham, unsurprisingly, turned out to be the most exclusive of a string of exclusive communities on the coast north of San Francisco. And Ocean View—also unsurprisingly—was its most exclusive address. It wasn’t hard to see why: the road rose and dipped and twisted its way along the top of a line of wooded cliffs, passing—at a respectful distance—a select handful of magnificently-sited houses. Most of them were visible enough to attest to the owners’ wealth and taste, but too far away—or too well screened—to offer a glimpse of their fairy-tale lives. It was hard to make out where the grounds of one ended and the next began, but they must all have been enormous. When, after almost a mile, I reached 8761, it was only the tenth property I’d come to.

It was strikingly different from its neighbors. There were no tantalizing views of mock-Tudor splendor or faux-Spanish elegance; no sweeping vistas of the Pacific; no fancy wrought iron. The functional gate looked more like the entrance to a prison than to a palace. Beyond it all you could see was a narrow strip of drive plunging at a sharp angle into a dense wall of foliage, as if it couldn’t wait to scuttle out of the public eye into anonymity.

On one of the gateposts was a button, with a large metal panel above it. When I pressed the button the panel slid open to reveal a loudspeaker grille and what appeared to be a lens. An automated female voice said,

“What is your name?”

“Robert Lovelace. I’m here to see Stewart Crothers.”

There was a tiny pause while she/it processed what I’d said.

“Please show your ID.”

I opened my passport. As I held it up, I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, something slightly above me coming in my direction. I instinctively turned towards it. Not, as I was expecting, a bird, but a drone—splay-footed, boggle-eyed, like some obscene imp that had broken free from a Hieronymus Bosch nightmare. It dropped almost to ground level and made a quick tour of the car. Then the voice said,

“Open the trunk, please.”

I opened the boot. The drone hovered over my shoulder, relaying an image of the contents. It was difficult not to imagine its being disappointed. I had to remind myself that—for all its apparent autonomy—it was just a flying camera and had no means of distinguishing between a pair of matching bags and a dismembered corpse or a nuclear device.

“Please close the trunk,” said the voice. “The gate will open in five seconds.”

I got back into the car. I was barely through the gate when, glancing in the rear-view mirror, I saw it closing behind me. If this was a trap, there was no getting out of it now.

The drive seemed designed to disorientate, weaving through dense blue-green ranks of oak and fir, then—for no obvious reason—looping back on itself, so that it was impossible to keep a consistent sense of direction. But after a few minutes it abruptly emerged into a completely different world: an expanse of open parkland, artfully dotted with redwoods and little clusters of shrubs. After the gloom of the woods, the brilliance of the unfiltered sun was so dazzling that for a few seconds that was as much as I could see. But as my eyes adjusted, I made out a strip of foam-flecked blue along the horizon, and then—jutting out from the hillside—what appeared to be a gigantic rock-fall, that someone had for some reason painted white. Only when I was a couple of hundred yards away did it finally resolve itself into a collage of squares and rectangles and triangles, and I realized I was looking at Stewart Crothers’s house.

From the way it was set into the landscape—half-dominating, half-accommodating—it seemed to owe something to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. But this was a building that refused to acknowledge any antecedents. It was the incarnation of the modernist creed: make everything new. It had, undeniably, a kind of lunar beauty. But its disregard for convention made me uneasy. How do you approach someone who lives in a place like that? Do the normal social rules apply, or do you have to start again from scratch?

The drive curved round and widened into a sort of carriage sweep in front of the house. The main entrance was slightly off-center—twice the size of a normal front door, but still dwarfed by the enormous slab of granite that stuck out above it, like some Neolithic henge-builders’ idea of a porch. I got out of the car and started towards it. I was looking for a bell to push when a voice behind me called,

“Hi!”

I turned. A man: mid-forties, with sparse, tightly-curled gingery hair, coming towards me across the gravel. His movements seemed uncoordinated, arms jerking, one foot turned as if it wanted to go in a different direction from the rest of him. He was wearing shorts and a decrepit-looking Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned down to the navel. A mobile phone swung on a lanyard from his belt.

“You Bob?” he said.

“I’m beginning to think I must be.”

He stared at me, as if I’d replied in a foreign language. Then he smiled and said,

“Oh, I get it. Robert.” Up close, he smelt strongly of turpentine, and I could see spatters of paint on his clothes and bare skin.

“Bob’s fine,” I said. “I’m just not used to it.”

He shook his head. “Let’s do Robert.” He held his hand out. “I’m Stew.” We both caught it at the same moment and laughed. “Uh, Stewart.”

“Thank you so much for agreeing to see me,” I said.

“Sure.” His gaze strayed off towards the ocean, then scanned the grounds before looking back to me. “You like inside or out?”

“I’m in your hands. It’s all beautiful.”

“I prefer out.” He nodded at the house. “You want to wash up or anything first?”

“I’m fine.”

He retrieved his phone. I saw now that it actually wasn’t a phone at all, but a walkie-talkie. “Hi, honey,” he said. “We’re going down to the fire pit.”

He touched my elbow, then set off with his odd limbo-dance shuffle past the end of the house and across a rough triangle of lawn. As I caught up with him, he said, “I had a stroke last year. Bad news for me, good news for you. Because before that”—pointing back towards the road—“you’d have never have gotten through that gate. But death sends you a message, it kind of puts things in perspective.” He smiled, like a shy teenager. “So actually, maybe it was good news for me, too. Helped me to straighten out my priorities. Not that there’s a whole lot get through that gate even now.”

“I wasn’t sure I was going to. That’s quite an intimidating set-up you’ve got there.”

He laughed. “Most people don’t know about my health issues, don’t realize Stonewall Crothers has started to get a few cracks in him. And I figure, why advertise it? If someone’s meant to find me, they’ll find me. Till they do, I’m just going to get on with my life.”

He was silent until we reached the edge of the lawn. Ahead of us a rough path descended through trees and bushes. A warm breeze, smelling of salt and pine-needles and some kind of flower I couldn’t identify, blew up from the shore.

“You have to look out where you’re going here,” said Crothers, leading the way. He moved slowly, picking his steps carefully, holding his arms out for balance. “We could’ve put in a handrail. But you do that, and you’re kind of missing the point.” He looked back up at me, monitoring my reaction. “There’s got to be some places where it’s just you and it, right?”

I nodded. After a minute or so the slope levelled out and we emerged on to a shoulder of rock. Halfway down, shaded by overhanging branches, was a shallow depression with a granite hearthstone in the middle, scattered with the remains of a recent fire. Three or four upended logs served as makeshift stools.

“Welcome to the fire-pit,” said Crothers. “Sit down.”

I perched on one of the logs. He settled himself next to me and leaned his elbows on his thighs, looking at the view.

“Seems like I been coming here a lot lately,” he said. “You know those Indian stories—American Indian, I’m talking about—about our ancestors? How, in the beginning, we all came out of a hole in the earth? Well, this feels like where I came out. And where I’m going to go back.” He turned and grinned at me. “Where you’re sitting, right now, that’s the place they’re going to bury my ashes. Am I embarrassing you?”

“No, of course not.”

“You look like you just swallowed a pool ball.”

I smiled. I glanced down at my shoes. They glared back at me reproachfully.

“Makes a lot of people feel kinda yaaah.” He looked at the Pacific again. “So, you want to know why Evan’s the way he is.” He paused, wound a bit of grass round his finger, snapped it off. “I’ll tell you. One word. Two. He’s scared.”

“Scared of what?”

“All the usual stuff, I guess.” He chewed the grass stem for a few seconds. “What are you scared of?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Death, I suppose. Pain.”

He nodded. “How about someone seeing right inside of you? Past the guy with the preppy clothes and the neat way with words who knows all about Romanesque churches in Lower Normandy?” He smiled at me. “Yeah, I looked you up.”

“I don’t just write about churches in Lower Normandy.”

“No, no, I know that. But let’s say, someone who sees past all the stuff you’ve done, right the way down to the little kid inside who’s secretly terrified he may not be that great after all. And who’d rather disappear up his own ass than show his real feelings. ’Cause that way, nobody can laugh at him.” He saw my expression. “Too rude?”

“No, no, no.”

“See, that’s what keeps Evan awake nights. The idea someone could do that to him.”

“What is he frightened they’ll find?”

“Hoo, boy.” He shook his head. “I’m not a shrink—though if you saw all the money I spent on them over the years, you’d think I’d have figured out how they do it. So I don’t know. But I’m guessing it has to be something to do with the way he was raised. It always is, isn’t it?”

“That appears to be the consensus.”

He leaned over and tugged my tailored sleeve. “Where’d this come from?”

“I don’t know. Poor potty training, I expect.”

He laughed. “Yeah, right.” The laughter went on. It seemed to surprise him as much as he did me. It was a few seconds before he’d brought it under control.

“Though when I say the way he was raised,” he said, “maybe that’s kind of misleading. The way he raised himself, that could be a better way of putting it. You know about Coyote Fork?”

“Coyote what?”

“Fork.”

I shook my head.

“It’s like this commune. Where he grew up.”

“A religious commune?”

“A hippie commune.” He waved his hand northwards. “Way up there in the mountains. Or at least, it was. It was abandoned, I don’t know, must be twelve, fifteen years ago now. But you really want to understand Evan Bone, that’s where you got to look. Only problem is . . .” He shook his head. “That guy in Romania, you know, the dictator, what was his name?”

“Ceausescu?”

“Yeah, that’s right. Ceausescu. Had this huge palace, looked like a movie set for Aladdin or something. And when the revolution came and they got inside, they found miles and miles of tunnels under it. That’s the way Evan is. Always was, even way back when I met him. You try to find your way through the maze, you just get lost. Nothing’s connected, see. There’s the time he found his mom screwing another guy. Actually, lots of times, and lots of other guys. There were the kids that bullied him, he never said why, but it was so bad, one time they broke his arm. There was the morning his mom got home, only half dressed, looking like a slut, that’s the word he used. And he asked her where she’d been, and she said, I spent the night with Simon or Paul or whoever it was, and Evan was so freaked he dropped the bucket of water he was carrying. And his dad got mad and filled the bucket up again and held Evan’s head under till he thought he was going to drown.”

“God.”

“Yep, God about covers it. But you say to him, man, that’s terrible, is that why you don’t trust women, and he says: ‘It’s just what happened. It’s data. Don’t try to turn it into a story. Stories are lies.’”

“Ah. TOLSTOY.”

“Tolstoy?”

“Have you heard about TOLSTOY?”

“Russian guy? Wrote War and Peace? I never read it.”

“Evan Bone’s latest project?”

He shook his head. I told him what I could remember from Jeff Lamarr’s presentation.

“Yeah,” he said. “That figures. The only way you can stop people knowing what’s going on inside your skull is to know what’s going on in theirs. So you design an algorithm to tell you. And then sell it to them by saying it’s just to help you give them more of what they want.”

“Which it is, of course. Because that allows you to sell more advertising.”

“Sure. But that’s not the main point. Money’s only useful if it buys you more power. More protection. That has to be what it’s about for Evan.”

He paused, frowning, then got up and walked over to the hearthstone. He bent down and retrieved a charred fragment of canvas daubed with discolored red. He studied it for a moment, then pulled a lighter from his pocket and set fire to it. As the flames took hold, he dropped it on the stone and watched it turn to ash.

“Didn’t notice that before,” he said. “I don’t like to leave things. They’re here, and then they’re gone. That’s the way it should be.”

“Was that one of your paintings?”

He didn’t reply but returned to his seat and sat down again. “Anyway,” he said, “that’s one of the things really bugs me. If Evan’d taken my idea and used to it become the third richest guy on the planet, I could have lived with it. But he wants to be the most powerful guy on the planet. That’s something else. That’s like the opposite of everything Global Village was supposed to stand for. You know that thing, You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family? Well, my idea was to create something would fix that. It didn’t matter where your home was, what you saw when you looked out the window: Global Village meant you could be part of a community you truly felt you belonged to.” He paused. “You ever actually seen Global Village? Online, I mean?”

“No.”

“I wanted it to be like a real village, where everyone has their own house. So you don’t have friends, like Facebook: you have neighbors. That could just mean a bunch of people share your hobby. Or it could mean a virtual tribe, with its own values, its own rules for deciding who could and couldn’t be a member. That’s the way I envisioned it.”

“Well, that’s still more or less how it works, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. Only the way Evan set it up, there’s a difference. It doesn’t affect most people, the guys who are into macramé or basket-weaving. But there’s a couple million, maybe more now, closed communities, and that’s where it impacts.”

“The dark communities?”

He nodded. “There’s all kind of stuff goes on there that no one else ever gets to hear about. A lot of it’s probably pretty harmless, just industry-standard crazy, you know, weird passwords and funny handshakes, and every second Wednesday of the month you get to wear one red sock and one blue, so the other crazies can recognize you. But there’s some are plain downright bad. And Evan protects them. They’re autonomous associations, he says. Which means they have the right to be their own gatekeepers. If they break the law, then it’s for the law to take action. What he doesn’t say is, they may be their own gatekeepers, but he has the master key. So any time he wants to, he can see what’s going on in all of them. And some of them are groups he created himself. Like guerrilla cells. Ready to go to his defense if he’s attacked.” He paused. “Same old, same old, you know? He has to know everything. He has to be inside everybody’s heads. Because that’s the only way he can be safe.”

“Guerrilla cells? What, people who’d break into someone’s emails, you mean? Looking for things to discredit them?”

He nodded. “You wonder why I texted you, instead of replying to your email? That’s why. Every message I send, every message I receive. So I got your number from the Voss woman. I have a whole bunch of phones, different SIMs. He’s probably tracking those as well, but that’ll be harder for him.” He squinted up at the sky. “Plus he has a couple satellites up there can show him what I’m doing, right here, right now. If I leave, he knows exactly where I’m headed. So I don’t leave any more. I never go anyplace.” He laughed. “It’s like living in a goldfish bowl. Except goldfish get to see the people watching them.”

“You think he’s watching us now?”

He shrugged. “He could be. But that’s all it takes, isn’t it? It’s enough to make you feel you’re transparent. He knows you’re here, you can absolutely count on that.”

“God.”

He laughed. “I feel your pain. If it’s any consolation, it doesn’t seem to be helping him any. He’s been doing some pretty crazy stuff lately. Like what he said about Hazel Voss. And last I heard, nobody even knew where he was. He’d gone AWOL.”

“Where did you see that?”

“I don’t know. Some news feed. Couple days back.” He laughed. “Maybe he knows you’re on to him. And he’s running scared.”

His walkie-talkie buzzed suddenly. I could hear the music of a woman’s voice at the other end, but not the words.

“Hold on,” he said. “I’ll check.” He turned to me. “You want coffee?”

“Yes, please.”

“Thanks, honey. Yeah, that’d be great.”

As he switched the handset off I said,

“Do you think he has contacts in the police?”

“Evan? Why do you ask that?”

I told him about my experience that morning.

“Hoo,” he said. “I don’t know. Could just have been some loser from the sticks trying to show what a swinging dick he is. You know, by picking up an illegal alien. A place like Riddick, they see illegal aliens crawling out the woodwork and hiding in trash-cans.”

I lifted my tie so that it caught the light.

“Yeah, that looks pretty alien to me,” he said. “Hm. Maybe Evan’s actively started to recruit cops now. After buying up every newspaper and TV station he can get his hands on, it’d be kind of a logical next step, wouldn’t it? A way to get even more power.” He leaned forward and began riffling through the grass with his finger, as if he might find the answer there. “What I really don’t get is, when I first talked to him about Global Village, he hated the idea. Why the fuck would you want to do something like that? he said. I remember that, because it was the only time I ever heard him use a profanity. That sounds just like Coyote Fork, he said. People getting to choose their own community. And it’s a nightmare. A frigging freak show. And that’s when he told me about his dad and the bucket of water.”

“Perhaps he was just trying to put you off the scent. So you wouldn’t suspect he was planning to nick the idea himself.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think it was that. He was really mad about it. But then, after I left Stanford, went to New York, something happened.” He paused, as if he’d suddenly reached the limit of what he could say. “How come you’re so interested, anyway? Seems like a kind of a jump. From Norman churches to Evan Bone.”

I’d started to convince myself that he wasn’t going to ask: that, in his eyes, my having come to him via Ginny Voss was enough of a bona fide. Now, suddenly, I realized that Ginny Voss had brought me as far as she could. If I wanted more, it would have to be on my own merits. So how much should I tell him? I couldn’t imagine his being sympathetic to Anne’s views. On the other hand, without her, the story was bloodless. In the end, I took a chance and gave him everything apart from my strange encounter in the Global Village car park, which I thought might put me in the one-red-sock-and-one-blue category.

“So we’re talking revenge?” he said, when I had finished.

I rolled the word around in my mouth. It tasted like undercooked meat.

“That’s not quite how I’d put it,” I said.

“How would you put it?”

His voice had hardened. He was starting to barricade himself against me.

“I don’t know.”

“Well,” he said, “you and your friend been pissed on, right? Treated like worthless pieces of shit. So the one thing you want to do before you die is make the guy that did that to you regret it. That’s natural. It’d be weird if you didn’t. You want him to say, Phoo-ee, did I ever underestimate that Robert and Anne. Biggest mistake of my life. If I hadn’t done that, I’d still be numero uno. Everyone would admire me. But the way things are right now, I wish I’d never been born.”

“I suppose there’s an element of that. But—”

“An element of that. Man, do you sound fancy-dancy.”

“If that was meant to be an English accent, you need to give it a bit more practice.”

He laughed. “I’m sorry, I just went and took a flying leap over the line again, didn’t I? Listen, I’m not criticizing you, man. Believe me, I’ve been there. I know those feelings. I had them the last fifteen years. They nearly killed me.” He waved towards the sea. “I have all this, more money than I know what to do with, a beautiful woman too. Well, the beautiful woman came later. She was the start of the good karma. But for the longest time it was like I didn’t even notice any of that. I was, you know”—clenching his fists, tortoising his neck down into his shoulders—“I have to pay that motherfucker back. That was all I ever thought about. It made me sick. Didn’t matter how much I exercised, my blood pressure was off the dial. The miracle is I didn’t have a stroke before.” He paused. “So if you’re sick, I don’t want to say anything’s going to make you sicker. Help you get a stroke all your very own.”

“Well, I appreciate the concern. But—”

“Well, I appreciate the concern.” He laughed again. “I don’t want your appreciation, man. I want you to think why you’re doing this. All I’m saying is, if it’s to destroy Evan Bone, you’ll just end up destroying yourself.”

And here endeth the first lesson. It was a struggle not to say, I didn’t come here for a crash course in pop psychology.

“From what you’ve told me,” I said, “I’d have thought you’d think it was a public service.”

I could hear the starchiness in my own voice. He caught it too. He smiled.

“Well, no question, people need to realize what Evan’s doing. They need to resist it. That’s the whole reason I’m talking to you. But destroying’s what he does. You know, by saying, I’m totally cool, and the other guy’s totally evil, and I’m going to rub his nose in his own shit till he admits it. That’s not doing Evan any good. It’s not doing the other guy any good. It’s not doing anyone any good.”

And here endeth the second lesson. I gave a perfunctory nod.

“Not convinced, huh?” he said. “It doesn’t do any good because it’s not real. The world just ain’t divided up like that, a couple suburban yards with a neat white picket-fence between them. There’s a man-size chunk of evil in you. And a big streak of cool in the other guy.” He touched his sternum. “You wouldn’t believe the garbage I found down here when I looked. A victim, pure as the driven snow: that’s what I was expecting to find. Instead I come face to face with a greedy little fuck, who took 150 million bucks from the guy who stole his idea, in exchange for keeping his mouth shut. And who’s spent the whole time since then trying to hide from the consequences. Like what happened to your friend Anne or Hazel Voss.” He turned to look at me. “I’m telling you, man, it’s hard. A whole lot easier to do what Evan did—what I did till I got sick: refuse to join the dots. That way, you don’t need to accept responsibility. Except one day, it’ll catch up with you. And then you’re going to have to pay the price.”

He jerked up a piece of grass and abstractedly tied it into a circle.

“But you do what you do right,” he went on, after a few seconds, “and join the dots for him, and maybe that’d help him.” He raised his head again. “I remember something I read once. Something a wise man said: To understand everything is to forgive everything.”

“The wise man in question was Tolstoy.”

“Is that right?”

I nodded. “Pierre. In War And Peace. ‘Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.’”

“You’re kidding me.” He started to laugh, then stopped and turned sharply. A woman was coming down the path towards us, choosing her steps with balletic precision to avoid dropping the tray she was carrying. She was younger than he was, short and big-hipped, with Spanish-dark skin and thick black hair unmarked by white.

“Hi,” she said. “Did I time this OK?”

Crothers nodded. She balanced the tray on a log and held her hand out.

“I’m Montserrat. Pleased to meet you.”

Her smile. Radiant would be the obvious word. But like all off-the-peg descriptions, it runs the risk of slipping by unnoticed. So dip your fingers into the water and fish it out. There. Now add to the brilliance a kind of electric jolt, such as you get when you accidentally touch an un-insulated cable.

“Robert,” I said. “Or Rob. Or Bob. Or a chap with a silly accent. Take your pick.”

She laughed and turned towards Crothers. “So you’re done?”

“Pretty much.”

“You told him about Beth?”

For the first time, he seemed ill at ease. He grimaced, then hooked a hand over his scalp and scratched it, so cartoon-characterish you expected to see a thought bubble materialize above his head saying: Thinks. Finally he looked at me and said,

“You know how this lady came into my life?”

I shook my head.

“You tell him.”

“I wrote my car off,” she said. “Just there.” She pointed up the slope towards the road. “I wasn’t hurt bad. Just a few scratches. But I was shaken up pretty good. And the car obviously wasn’t going any place again. Except the wrecking yard.” She smiled at Crothers and impulsively touched his arm. “So this guy, he heard the noise and came out to see what had happened. And”—pinching the front of her blouse and pulling it taut—“look what he found. And I’ve been here ever since.”

Crothers nodded. “Goooood karma.” He poured the coffee and handed me a cup. “You have to learn to trust that stuff. So if she thinks it’s OK, I guess it’s OK. Sit down again. I’ll tell you about Beth. It doesn’t make me look good. But what the hell.”