“I’ve got a job for you,” he said.
She turned a page and peered at it. “Is Mommy going to die too?” she asked from behind the book.
He had to close his eyes again. “No,” he said. “She’s just very upset and we have to do everything we can to help her. That’s the job I have for you.”
The pressure eased, and he opened his eyes. She lowered the book, squinting at him. “Did Mommy hurt when the doctor gave her the needle?”
“A bit.” He felt his throat seizing totally shut, and he hurried to say it all. “Sweetheart, when the doctor comes out of the bedroom, I think Mommy would like it very much if you went in and covered her with a blanket and snuggled next to her. She’ll be asleep and she won’t know you’re next to her, but when she wakes up, it’s very important that one of us be there to say hello. Can you do that for her?”
“You screamed at me and pushed me.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m very sorry.”
5
They were standing in the sunlit open doorway at the bottom of the stairs, watching him. The one was tall and big-hipped, the other was thin, and they both had their badges out. All the time he continued down the stairs, clutching the rail, they never stopped watching him.
He sat at the table in the kitchen while the tall big-hipped one asked the questions and the thin one glanced around at the spilled milk all over and the broken glass by the stove.
“My name’s Webster,” the big-hipped one said. “He’s Ford. Do you know what kind of poison it was?”
“No.” Their names shouldn’t have seemed important to him. The pills were doing it, he guessed. He knew he had heard their names somewhere before, but the pills were clouding his mind so much that he couldn’t place them.
“Well, do you know how the baby got his hands on it?”
“Yes. It was in the milk that came this morning.”
“The milk?” Webster asked incredulously. He and Ford looked sharply at each other.
“That’s right. My cat died from it too. I put her over on the cellar steps.” The pills were certainly fixing him. His voice sounded to him as if it came from somewhere outside his head.
Ford went to see the cat, stepping over the milk and broken glass by the stove. He seemed to take a very long time to cross the last few feet toward the cellar door. Tired of waiting for him to get there, he himself turned slowly in his chair, and from where he sat at the kitchen table he could see out the big front window in the living room to where the driver had backed the ambulance out of the driveway and parked it at the curb between the two fir trees. He could see the driver sitting behind the steering wheel out there, looking in the rearview mirror, combing his hair.
“I asked you a question,” Webster was saying. “I asked you if you had any idea how the poison got in the milk.”
“Kess,” he answered, still looking toward the ambulance. The curtains on the side were drawn; there was a small object outlined behind them, but he couldn’t be sure it was Ethan. He thought of the rough starchy white sheets that Ethan must be lying on but couldn’t feel.
“How’s that?”
“A man named Kess did it.”
“You know this man? You know for a fact that he did this?”
“Not personally. I mean, I know him, but I don’t think he did it personally. He likely ordered someone else to do it. I met him early this year for an article I was working on.” His voice sounded even farther outside his head. He was having trouble now getting enough breath to say all the words.
Outside, the ambulance driver finished combing his hair.
“Please look at me,” Webster said.
He managed to turn to him.
“What do you mean an article you were working on?”
“I’m a writer.”
“Hey, no kidding,” Ford said, interested, coming back from the cellar door. That was the first he had spoken. “What do you write? Maybe I’ve read your stuff.”
“Novels. Stories.” It was all too complicated to explain. Because of his writing, Ethan was dead, but he was losing the strength to tell them, and finally he had to fall back on the standard modest reply he always gave to strangers who asked him about his work. “I got lucky three years ago with a novel that made the best-seller lists and was turned into a movie.” He gave the name.
“I must have missed that one,” Ford said.
Webster looked around at the kitchen and the living room. The place was more than a hundred years old, its inside walls made of brick and oak. The money from the book had meant that he could afford to buy it and restore its features. It had the feel of old photographs, of solid deep-grained dark wood and heavily mortared walls and things that were built to outlast the men who fashioned them. Webster obviously was thinking, yeah, you got lucky all right. “What about this article?” he asked.
“When I’m having trouble with a book, I sometimes let it rest and try an article. God help me, last December some things happened with Kess that made me want to write about him.”
“Who is this guy anyway?” Ford asked.
It was all too much to explain. He had the sensation that his brain was slowly revolving inside his skull, and when he concentrated to stop it, the kitchen shifted on an angle. He stood off-balance, steadied himself, and made his way off the cold hardwood floor onto the deep soft rug toward the wall of bookshelves in the living room.
“What’s the matter?” Webster asked. “What are you doing?”
“Getting you this,” he answered, wondering if he would be able to get back and sit down again, opening a copy of the magazine with his article in it. “I don’t know how to put it better than this.”
6
Chemelec is the base of Kess’s organization, his command post. It stands in the middle of a large open field on the outskirts of Providence, Rhode Island: a huge sprawling one-story structure made of cinder blocks that give it the appearance of an enormous bunker, windowless, surrounded
by
a tall electric
barbed-wire fence
with several armed guards patrolling the perimeter.
The company manufactures chemicals and electronics equipment, but its profit is due mostly to sizable subsidies
from
various large American corporations. After all, Kess has insisted from the start on the abolition of trade unions. His followers themselves contribute dues to the company. They need to keep
it
working: they need quick access to those chemicals and electronic instruments required for the kind
of
sophisticated explosives they plan to use in time of emergency, required
as
well for chemical warfare and the electronic jamming of enemy radio communications.
The company was founded
by
Kess in
1965,
an amalgamation of two other companies that went bankrupt on him in 1964 because of what he insists was government pressure on his customers not to renew their contracts. That is only a sign of his differences with the government, not the cause of it. He was with those American forces that invaded Germany in 1945 and were ordered to stop when the Russians came in from their side. He was only twenty
then, politically uneducated, but he could see what was
going
to happen between America and Russia in Germany, and he had watched so many of his friends die in combat that he insisted America had the right to take the country for her own. He insisted so
much that he was ordered
to
keep his views to himself, and when he did not, he was given a psychiatric discharge as a paranoid aggressive.
In 1963, he and five friends were deer hunting in upper Michigan when someone else in the woods took a shot at them by mistake. From all reports they enjoyed the scare, found cover, deployed and double-flanked the man, fired several intended near misses at him, forced him to surrender his rifle, then intimidated him for the rest of the day until they finally chased him screaming from the woods. What delighted them most was their discovery that years out
of
the army they still retained their presence of mind under fire,
re
called exactly how
to
trap a man, and did it well. They began talking about their war experiences and decided that
if
the
country
were ever attacked, a distinct possibility they believed, they would still be able
to p
ut up a good fight. Over drinks that night they warmed even more to the idea, figured how they would do it, camping in the hills, living off the land, sniping, hitting a patrol here, a supply depot there, backing deep into the woods before they could be pursued. Ideally, of course, the enemy could never be allowed past the coastline, but that required meticulous defensive preparations, and as far as they were concerned, the government was
too
weak to do
so,
riddled as they believed it was with the enemy or enemy sympathizers. Kess himself supplied the name for the organization—The Guardians of the Republic.
“Your wife is resting fine now.”
He looked, and the doctor was standing at the archway to the kitchen. The living-room rug had evidently muffled his approach. His hair was parted perfectly again.
“She’ll be waking around six,” the doctor continued. “She’ll be groggy and she won’t want to eat, but give her some soup anyway, and if she gets frantic again, here’s two more of those pills. Is your foot hurting very badly?”
“My foot?” He peered down. His bare feet seemed far below him, as if he saw them through the reversed end of a telescope, and he had to stop himself from peering too far down and falling. The nail on his right toe had been ripped half away from the flesh. Thick blood clotted darkly under it. The toe was numb. He had thought that was because of the pills.
“I didn’t even know. It must have happened when we were struggling with Claire. I’ll take care of it myself. After you leave. It’ll be something to do to keep my mind off everything.”
“There’ll need to be an autopsy.”
He wasn’t prepared. He had a sudden image in his mind of the doctor slitting open Ethan’s small chest, spreading the flaps, removing the organs. “All right,” he said quickly, “yes,” and studied the two long yellow pills in his hand to cancel the image of the open chest. “You lied to me about these pills.”
“They’re relaxing you, aren’t they?”
“Sure. If you call wanting to fall off my chair being relaxed.”
The doctor picked up his medical bag.
“A minute with you, Doctor,” Webster said.
The doctor looked at him. “Certainly.”
“No. Not here.”
He wondered what was going on. He watched the doctor look quizzical once more as Webster took him from the kitchen, crossed the living room with him, and disappeared into the hallway by the door. Then he heard Webster start talking in the hall, and he found out. Webster was talking very quietly, but his words were carrying back all the same.
“I would have assumed you’d check on this anyhow, Doctor,” Webster was saying out of sight in the hallway. “But you’ve already removed the body before I could look and have pictures taken, so let me be direct. I want to know if there are any bruises on the body. We’ll have our own man help with the autopsy, and we’ll have our own man go over the cat. No reflection on you, but this is all just funny enough that I want to have a double shot at it so nobody misses anything.”
As he listened, he looked steadily at Ford in the kitchen, and the detective did his best to act preoccupied, glancing embarrassed at the floor, shifting his glance toward the milk on the table and then toward the broken glass by the stove, as if there were something important that he had not seen before.
Ford finally got the idea of lighting a cigarette. “You want one?” But he didn’t wait for an answer. “Listen, Webster doesn’t mean any harm. Really. It’s just his way. The last time he was sympathetic was ten years ago. A guy’s eight-year-old daughter was raped and killed, and Webster sat around with him, talking about how bad it was. The guy had a theory that a strange kid from the high school did it. So as soon as Webster left, this guy went after the kid with a shotgun and found him before Webster did and blew the kid’s head off. If that wasn’t bad enough, it turned out that this guy and Webster were wrong. The kid wasn’t the one.”
“But I’m
not
wrong.”
“No. Listen—”
But the doctor was leaving, closing the door, and Webster was coming back into the kitchen.
“You don’t need to worry about any bruises,” he told Webster. “I don’t go around punching five-month-old babies.”
“You heard?”
“Like you were announcing it.”
“Well, I’m sorry.”
“You should be.”
“I mean I’m sorry you heard. I’m not sorry about the way I’m doing this. I tried to be delicate about it, but since you want to make a point, we might as well have it in the open. Poison in milk, that’s new to me. But I’ve seen cases a little like it where the baby accidentally got his hands on a bottle of bleach or floor wax or furniture polish. Except that when you check the child’s body you find it’s no accident at all. Because the kid is bruised from head to foot and maybe he’s got ruptured organs and dislocated joints and the parents just finished him off, crazy enough to think we won’t notice he’s black and blue. So you say this guy Kess is responsible, and I have no reason to doubt it. But I want to see this thing from a lot of angles, and you wouldn’t think much of me if I didn’t. Shootings, knifings, those I can understand, those I can live with and treat as routine. But I’ve got two kids myself, and when I hear about a baby that’s been poisoned by its milk, well Jesus.”
7
The ambulance was gone. The lab men, the police photographers, the fingerprint crew had been and left. There were women across the street, watching the final police car, watching the three of them come out onto the porch. Webster gave him a card with a phone number on it, and Ford stood there in the bright sunlight, holding the two plastic sacks with the half bottle of milk and the cat bunched stiffly, and he still couldn’t place their names. His toe felt like a knife blade had been rammed under it. Abruptly the names came to him. Of course. Webster and Ford. Elizabethan dramatists.