“Because those other ladies who work down there wouldn’t even know. They’re both kind of stupid.”
“Right.” They wouldn’t fingerprint origami, would they? And Rocky couldn’t go downstairs. It was horrible to be glad for that, but thank the Lord, Rocky could not wheel himself down the stairs.
We both relaxed a little, and Ian started counting all the cows we passed.
I said, “So even after you’re back, you might not see me in Hannibal a lot.”
“That one other librarian always loses her place when she reads, every single time.”
We hadn’t figured out yet what Ian would say, and when he reclined the passenger seat all the way and closed his eyes, I was glad for the time to think. We’d probably have time in Burlington, too—who knew if Greyhound would have tickets for anytime soon? We might have to live there a few more days, camping out in the middle of Church Street, stealing bread crusts off the café tables.
I hadn’t thought of anything brilliant by the time we got there. I started to wake Ian up as I parked, but he opened his eyes on his own and began organizing his backpack and the plastic bag he’d been carrying when the backpack became too small. I saw, as he rearranged everything, that he still had all the Vermont books and the Lynton library books. I made him give them back to me.
“Because it would be like a trail?” he said. He was getting good at this.
“You can finish
The 21 Balloons
at the library,” I said. “I know we have two copies. And you have to promise me you’ll check out
The Hobbit
, too. But you could read
Johnny Tremain
on the bus.”
As we climbed out of the car, he said, “You know the whole thing about the shrimp? That means, like, lobster and everything too? Didn’t the Pilgrims eat lobsters, from the Atlantic Ocean? I thought the Pilgrims were very Christian.”
Mr. Shades was suddenly nowhere to be seen, but I doubted that would last very long.
“That’s what it says.”
“Are you sure?”
“You can look it up when you get back. It’s in Leviticus, I think.”
He opened the back door of the car and searched under the seats to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. His voice emerged from the car floor: “But it’s just, like—that can’t be
right
.”
It was a small triumph, but I was enormously happy. Those stupid shrimp and lobsters might, in the long run, be the crucial wedge between Ian and Pastor Bob. We crossed the parking lot to the small, quiet building.
I reconsidered his amazement the night before at no one but him solving the mystery of Havre. It was the universal revelation of adolescence, that the adults around you do not have all the answers—and like all children growing slowly and painfully into their mature selves, he’d realize it again and again over the next few years. But in Ian it was more than a simple disillusionment. It might well be what would save his life. It had saved the lives of thousands of people before him, the ones who, unlike my friend Darren, had looked at those outdated moral codes, at the judgments of their parents and aunts and priests, and said the same thing:
Wait, no. That can’t be right.
I was no moral relativist. I couldn’t have been, or I’d have believed that Pastor Bob was entitled to his opinion, that the Drakes should raise Ian however they saw fit. It had always bothered me that fundamentalists would assume, when you argued with them about gay rights or abortion or assisted suicide, that you were arguing that there was no absolute right. When really I do believe in an absolute right; I just don’t believe in
their
absolute right. I don’t believe that the universal truths are encoded in a set of ancient Aramaic laws about crop rotation and menstrual blood and hats.
We approached the counter inside the Greyhound station, and Ian himself spoke to the attendant, a smiling old man who seemed thrilled to talk with a child. There was a bus leaving at 10:45, in only an hour and a half, and if he transferred just twice he could stop right in Hannibal, and yes, there were seats still available. Ian didn’t seem surprised at all—and no wonder, Hannibal being the center of his world—but I was astounded. And vaguely insulted, as if the universe had just slapped me in the face. Not only did the universe want him out of my hands and back home, it wanted it
immediately
.
“How old do I need to be to travel by myself?” Ian asked. I was impressed—I wouldn’t have thought of it.
“If the trip’s more than five hours, you gotta be fifteen.”
“Oh, thank goodness,” Ian said loudly. “Because I just turned fifteen last Tuesday. And I got a learning permit for driving a car!”
The man raised an eyebrow at me. I nodded. Yep, really fifteen.
“You might think I’m kind of short,” Ian went on. I willed him to stop talking. “But that’s because I drank too much coffee. It stunts your growth.”
The man tapped his fingers on the counter, a lot less amused now. “I’m gonna need some ID to that effect.”
Ian and I looked at each other. I didn’t even have enough money to come with him if I wanted to. Besides which I’d be abandoning my car. And I’d have to get off the bus early, in Illinois somewhere, with no car and no money, and nowhere near Chicago. “This is really an emergency situation,” I said. “His mother—I’m not his mother—his mother is very sick.” The man shook his head.
“Hey!” a voice behind us said. “No worries! I have got here in time!” A thick Russian accent.
It was Mr. Shades. The shades still on, even indoors.
I stared at him, at the forehead above the sunglasses, at the cheekbones and stubble and thin lips below—but he was no one I knew, no cousin or family friend, no shady business associate from my father’s Russian Chicago. He said to the ticket agent, “I go with the boy. We go to Missouri, yes, okay?” My instinct was to grab Ian and dive through the “Staff Only” door and blockade ourselves, but Mr. Shades’s left hand was in the pocket of his blazer, and I figured he might have a gun.
“Okay, then,” the man behind the counter said, glancing at me to make sure it was all right, which I must have indicated it was. “One child ticket, one adult.” He rang it up, and Mr. Shades pulled an alligator skin wallet out of the left pocket. He paid with three crisp hundred-dollar bills. Ian looked even more terrified than I was, and only slightly impressed by all the money. I planted my hands on his shoulders.
Once the ticket man handed the tickets and receipt over to our Russian interloper, we all three walked to the far side of the station, awkwardly, slowly, each of us glancing constantly at the other two to make sure we were cohering as a group. A loud trio of older women in matching green T-shirts separated us now from the ticket counter.
“Listen,” said the man, “I no hurt him. They tell me, Mr. Hull will kill me if I touch him. I no want to touch him to begin with, okay? I just sit in the back of the bus. I be like Rosa Parks, okay? Yes? Back of the bus. I am not wanting to mess with Mr. Hull, you believe me.”
Ian said, “You know Mr. Hull? The guy with the horns?”
I said, “You gave us fifty dollars. At the Walgreens.” I realized I’d been holding Ian’s shoulders this whole time, digging my nails in.
He took off the sunglasses, finally. He had small green eyes. “Look, I was not intend to scare you! You are very pretty lady, okay, and I was not wishing to make scared!” He handed me a business card:
Alexei Andreev
, it said. And underneath, in place of an occupation:
Reliable, discreet.
He said, “I work many times before for Mr. Leo Labaznikov, and I never make mistake.”
I had been so stupid, assuming the cigars in that shoebox had been for a past or future favor. They were for a
present
favor. There had probably been a stack of money in there, too. And that morning at the Labaznikovs’ house, the way they’d kept us there so late, they must have just been waiting for Mr. Shades to show up. Though how my father had figured anything out, I didn’t know. How had I fallen for his lies for twenty-six years when he didn’t fall for mine for ten minutes?
Alexei Andreev reached into his other blazer pocket and handed Ian a shiny black cell phone, one of the skinny new ones. “This is extra, okay? The boy can test this, you see it works, he can hold this in his hand the whole way.”
I said, “What are you going to do with your car?”
He laughed. “It’s a disposable.”
I had relaxed significantly by this point. Whoever this man was, whatever his training or criminal background, he was clearly, irreversibly, on my side. And as loath as I’d always been even to accept my father’s money, tainted as it was with the illicit dealings of his Russo-Chicagoan black market, I was in no position to turn down help. A little assistance from one criminal to another.
“You both go outside,” he said, “in the good weather. You test the phone, okay, and say bye-bye, and smoke a cigarette. I be here when the bus is going.”
Slowly, incredulously, we walked outside into the cold to go over our plan. Now that it was really going to happen, now that the tickets were bought, it seemed far too sudden. But there was no reason to wait, and no excuse, either. The sooner Ian got back home, the sooner the police would stop looking for him and amassing evidence. They’d move on to more pressing cases.
“Are you okay with this?” I asked.
“That guy was so cool! Why is he afraid of your dad? Do you think this really works?”
I took the phone and dialed my own cell with it. It worked. I programmed my number in, under the name Laura Ingalls, and we sat down on a gum-covered bench, out of earshot of the four other people waiting for the bus with suitcases.
“We need a story,” I said. “And it needs to be a good one.”
I remembered a project I had to do for high school Spanish, where we pretended we’d been accused of murder, and each set of partners had to come up with an airtight alibi, in Spanish. Then the rest of the class interrogated both of you alone, while your partner waited in the hall: “Which restaurant?” “What was the soda?” “What was the weather?” Rajiv Gupta and I thought we came up with the perfect story: we drove to the beach and watched the waves. Nothing happened, we didn’t talk, it was pleasant weather, we drove back to town in a red Ferrari, and that was it. We went over our clothes, how I wore my hair, and even whether the car’s gas tank was full. I answered my questions first, brilliantly, then went to wait in the hall and do my calculus. I remember just having turned on my calculator when the room broke into laughter and Señora Valdez called me back in. She explained, in heavily enunciated Spanish, that while I had answered the first question, “What body of water?,” with the geographically logical answer of “el lago Michigan,” Rajiv had answered “el océano Atlántico.” The whole time we planned, he’d been picturing his family’s trips to Maine. I’d been picturing the graffitied section of concrete waterfront across from my family’s building.
At least with Ian our stories didn’t have to match, because, God willing, they’d never ask for mine. “What do you want to tell them?”
“I thought I could say that I ran away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, like in
From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
. Because that sounds like something a kid would do, especially a kid that reads a lot.”
“No one’s going to believe that. They must have updated their security since that book was written. And it was fiction to begin with. I don’t think it was
ever
possible.” But on very little sleep, sitting in the cold shadow of a Vermont bus station with a detective waiting for me back at my apartment and a Russian henchman waiting inside for Ian, I couldn’t think of anything better.
“I could say I did all the things exactly like the kids in the book. Not the exhibit where they slept, because that might be gone now, but like I could say I hid in the bathroom stalls when the security guard came by. And I could say I took a bath in the fountain!”
“How would you have gotten there?”
“On a Greyhound bus! Because I’ll be an expert by the time I’m home. I could say I saved up my allowance. And I could say the guy believed I was fifteen. I can tell them the whole route I took, just backwards! I’ll memorize all the towns!”
I slapped my cheeks so I could wake up and think, but it didn’t work. Time was running out, and we had to pick something. “They probably won’t believe you no matter
what
you say. But if you stick to the same story about the Met, and keep repeating it over and over, and never change it or say anything about the library or Chicago or Vermont, at least they won’t know the
truth
. You just have to have a sense of humor about it. If they prove you wrong, if they say the Met burned down last week, you can laugh, but you just have to repeat the same story. Again and again and again. Even if they threaten you. And eventually they’ll give up. You just can’t tell them a single thing that’s true.”
“Because of you. Because you’d get fired.”
“Yes.” I wondered if I should tell him that I would probably never go back to the library. If he found out later that I’d left town forever, he might think he was free to tell the truth, or feel betrayed and do it in anger. “Even if I don’t come back,” I said, “you still have to stick to your story. I wouldn’t just get fired, I’d go to jail. For a very, very long time.” I wondered suddenly if this was even true. How bad would the real story actually be? I tried to drive him to his grandmother’s house. She turned out to be a dead soldier. I sent him home. They’d send me to jail, sure, but for how long? It wasn’t Russia. They wouldn’t drag me away in the dead of night. They wouldn’t poison my vodka.
Without knowing I was going to, I started to laugh, a crazy laugh like Ian’s the night before, and at first he looked worried, but then he started too. Even with the wind whipping past the station, even with Ian hugging his backpack to his chest for warmth, we were laughing, and not a laughter of release or a laughter that was really sadness in disguise. It was the laugh of the absurd. Your grandmother is a seventeen-year-old boy? That creepy Russian man just paid for your bus ticket? Ferret-Glo?
We eventually lost our momentum and sat in silence for a few minutes, and then I quizzed him on his story. (“What did you see at the Met?” “Well, the most interesting part was definitely the ancient part.” “Ian, we know you’re lying. There are motion detectors all over that place.” “I’m afraid they must have been broken when I was there.”) The plan was for him to get off the bus in Hannibal and keep hidden as well as he could on the walk downtown, where he’d finally turn himself in at the library. This was Ian’s cleverness again: because why would he turn himself in at the very place he’d run away to? And where would Ian Drake turn himself in
but
the Hannibal Public Library? I imagined him diving through the book return slot, Rocky scanning him back in, the computer blinking all caps: OVERDUE!