A Murder of Crows (6 page)

“You're the one they warned me about.”

“Who?”

“Trish Spence warned me about your eyes. And Theo warned me about your ass. Being warned about pale blue eyes I get—about a tight small ass, I've got no clue.”

“So you've been warned.”

“I have.” Yslan watched confusion cross Leena's face. She saw the remains of an injury she'd received in a car crash when she was Decker Roberts' high school girlfriend some twenty-four years ago.

“Is Decker in trouble?”

“I don't know, but if I can't find him I can't protect him.”

“Protect him from what?”

“Himself mostly.”

Leena nodded as a deep sorrow washed across her features. “I tried to do that for a while.”

“But he didn't go along with it?”

“No. Decker Roberts lives his life in tightly contained boxes. He's not into sharing. He . . .” She couldn't find the words so Yslan supplied them: “Doesn't play well with others.”

Leena's look turned hard. “Yeah. That. You finished with that sandwich?”

“Yes, thanks. Does he like Las Vegas?”

Leena stared at Yslan. “He loathes it.”

“And fears it?”

“Sure—fears and loathes Las Vegas.”

It was already late afternoon when Yslan contacted the NSA office in Las Vegas. Shortly thereafter she learned that she couldn't get a flight to Las Vegas until tomorrow morning.

After swearing at the airline schedules she told Mr. T and Ted Knight she'd meet them at the airport at 5:30 the next morning and drove off. She didn't want them with her when she drove her rental car past the hotel on Lakeshore that she and Decker had stayed in only fourteen months ago. She got out of the car in the parking lot and stared at the building. She couldn't get over the idea that something had happened in there—something important.

She saw the security guard at the hotel looking at her with that look security guards have right before they approach.

She turned and got back in her car.

By late twilight she found herself walking along Bloor Street West. It was more alive now than when she was last here. Maybe it was because it had been winter back then and it was spring now—but she doubted that was all there was to it.

She walked north then west along Annette Street, passing by the many houses of worship. She stopped in front of one that had been converted into expensive condos. There was another church down the way that was undergoing the same fate.

Why does this bother me?
she asked herself.
A church is just a building
. But she didn't believe it. She used to believe that—but not since she'd met Decker Roberts.

She turned onto the street where Decker Roberts used to live and passed by the remains of Roberts' house, its blackened beams still in plain sight, mocking the very idea that a home was a sanctuary—let alone a man's castle.

An hour later she used her key picks to open the door of Roberts' acting studio on Stafford Street around the corner from what looked to her like the world's largest state fair—but they didn't have states up here. Did they have state fairs? She didn't know.

She'd been in Roberts' acting studio once before right after she'd forced him to acknowledge that his friend Crazy Eddie had betrayed him to a lawyer in New York City named Charendoff.

At that time she'd perused the place, made sure that their hidden cameras and mics were still working properly, then commented on a review in the local paper for his television documentary
At the Junction,
saw his sixth-grade report card tacked to his office wall with the teacher's comment
Does not play well with others
circled in red. Back then her two assistants, Mr. T and Ted Knight, kept on asking her what exactly she was looking for. She didn't know then. She didn't know now, but she sensed that she was closer to knowing—closer to knowing Mr. Decker Roberts who did not play well with others and both feared and loathed Las Vegas and, oh yes, was the only human being she knew who had the gift of knowing beyond knowing when someone was telling the truth.

Emerson Remi saw the lights in the Pro Actors Lab studio blink on and was surprised. Wasn't there a note on its website that Decker Roberts had to leave town on a family matter?

Yes, there was.

So who was in the acting studio at this hour of the night?

He stepped further back into the shadows and waited. Since he'd first met Decker Roberts, he'd become good at waiting.

And when Yslan Hicks, a former lover of his, stepped out the front door at 72 Stafford Street, Emerson Remi—Princeton graduate, grandson of an Irish witch—smiled. “So he's given her the slip,” he whispered to the night air. “Good. Very good, Mr. Roberts. My brother in arms is on the loose—a wild thing—like myself.”

TWO DAYS LATER DECKER WAS SITTING IN THE HEATHROW
departure lounge in B concourse because his flight to Johannesburg had been delayed by a British Air strike when he heard, “Will Mr. Decker Roberts please report to security to receive an important message.”

Decker picked up the security phone and wasn't even a little surprised to hear the southern stylings of Special Agent Yslan Hicks.

“You know who this is?”

“Jodie Foster?”

“Very funny.”

“Ah, not Jodie Foster, Clarice Starling.”

“When did you become such a smartass?”

Decker didn't respond. He'd stopped answering open-ended questions a long time ago.

“Fine. You have a ticket waiting for you to JFK, it leaves gate twenty-nine in thirty-six minutes.

“First class?”

“The U.S. government doesn't do first class. Be on that plane, Mr. Roberts. Someone will meet you at JFK.”

“Why?”

“I don't like you travelling to foreign lands—”

“Without reporting in first?”

“That was the deal, so get your ass on that plane. By the by, how'd you like Las Vegas?”

After a moment he responded, “Not much.”

“Too much fear and loathing?”

“Maybe . . . sure. Question?”

“Maybe.”

“When did
you
become such a smartass?”

The question floored Yslan—when the fuck
had
she become such a smartass? She always was annoyed with people who had a quip for every circumstance. Who talked like, well, like smartasses on TV.

Decker hung up the phone and looked around him. No doubt someone was watching him. He'd known he was being watched for some time now. But an airport was a good place to lose a tail—and that's exactly what Decker believed he'd done.

Three hours later he handed over a fake passport to the air hostess at Gatwick. She smiled at him as she said, “Enjoy you flight, Mr. Rose.”

Gatwick to Amsterdam. Amsterdam to Cape Town.

He had promised Eddie that he would lose himself in Africa for a while, and that's just what the fuck he was going to do. And direct a play—he hadn't directed a play in a while and was surprised how much he was looking forward to it. The very thought of directing again had released two wonderfully random ideas in his head.

Four months back while he'd prepped a Canadian/Somali singer for a film audition, the musician had mentioned that most Somali men have committed their family histories to memory in verse. The poems often ran to several hundred stanzas and traced their exact lineage back to the first Somali. He had recited his. The buzzing cadence and the rhymes of the poems were unique and clearly present in the man's music.
They are the “path” of his music,
he thought.
A path backwards.

The other idea that intrigued Decker was the Australian aboriginal use of song lines, intricate memorized songs that described in great detail all the twists and turns of long land journeys, some in excess of a thousand miles with as many as seven hundred exact references such as “at the bend in the river, find the fallen rock with the cleft in
its side—turn toward the rising sun at the rock. That is the track to follow. But do not drink from the water of the river there.”

A path forward,
Decker thought, and somehow he knew that he personally stood at the meeting point of the two paths—one forward, one back.

THOUGHTS: We look like crows—all of us in our black gowns and the profs up there in theirs. We look like a flock of fucking crows. No, that's not the right collective noun. Not a flock of crows, but a murder of crows—yeah. A murder of crows. Good phrase that—a murder of crows. Gotta love that—a murder of crows.

How does that joke go? Yeah, there's this Taliban suicide prevention hotline and a kid calls up in the middle of the night and claims he's thinking terrible thoughts—that he's seriously considering killing himself. “Please help me,” he says.

The guy on the helpline says, “Sure. Can you drive a truck?”

AS GROVER CLEVELAND RABINOWITZ EMERGED FROM THE FOURTH
stall on the third-floor men's room of Lyndon Baines Johnson Dormitory at Ancaster College, he noticed that the turdlet had returned.

He'd first seen it almost five months ago. Then it disappeared and reappeared periodically thereafter. This time it had been gone for almost a week but now it was back—a desiccated thing, no more than an inch long, sitting on top of the floor drain almost directly across from the janitors' cleanup sign-in sheet, upon which the dates and times were all carefully printed but the signatures were completely illegible.

He closed his bathrobe and nudged the thing with the side of his flip-flop. If it wasn't the same one that had been there before then it was its twin sister—to Grover Cleveland Rabinowitz all turds (and turdlets) were female.

Grover noted that it didn't stink—no smell whatsoever. The others hadn't stunk either. It had been dried somehow, maybe microwaved. He went through the physics of microwaving in his head—a gross process as far as he was concerned—but yeah, this dried turdlet could definitely have been microwaved, or sun-dried, but that was hard to do in the spring rainy season here in upper New York State.

It never occurred to him to question who could have placed the thing on the drain outside the fourth stall of the men's washroom on the third floor of Lyndon Baines Johnson Dorm, let alone why the individual who did this would have done such a thing.

He was a “how” man—not a “who,” let alone a “why” man. “How” was the scientist's question.

And Grover Cleveland Rabinowitz was a scientist.

So he'd carefully noted the days the turdlet had appeared, disappeared then reappeared in a file he kept beside his computer that also contained his thesis on how to dry human fecal material.

It would prove to be a vital clue as to why and even who had planted the bombs that would in a month kill more than two hundred people. It was also the only thing that a heartbroken Mr. and Mrs. Rabinowitz didn't bother taking home from their dead child's room in Lyndon Baines Johnson Dormitory at Ancaster College—the world's most famous institution of higher learning in sciences, maths and applied engineering.

THE ANCASTER COLLEGE CAMPUS OVERLOOKED A SMALL,
formerly industrial town in the dead centre of which was its famous eighteenth-century church built by the founders of the college in a pristine symmetry they believed reflected the seriousness of their god.

There was an overpriced inn named after the college, naturally enough, then cheap outlying motels. The inn had an adequate to good restaurant, and the rest of the two-street town had the college's elaborate bookstore, a very fancy candy shop and of course a Whole Foods grocery.

The college was self-contained—the students never carried money, as every establishment in the town took Caster Cards. There was a small movie theatre that showed first-run flicks for five bucks and held pay-what-you-can Sundays and Mondays, but then Ancaster College brought in bands as famous as Arcade Fire and speakers as exclusive as the Dalai Lama—all for free. The students accessed a bar that served the under-aged with watered-down beer. The cops knew, the college knew—everyone knew. All agreed that it was the best way to handle the inevitability that the smartest science students in the world needed a place to blow off steam, no matter what their age.

Some of the faculty lived in college-owned properties on the outskirts of town, but the really famous (and wealthy) professors all flew into the tiny airport for their classes then returned through
the same airport to their real residences in New York or Chicago or Boston.

But on the other side of the hill, across the thruway, lived the townies in an enclave of their own, Stoney River—America's version of South Africa's townships.

And in the midst of that side growth to the college was the basement apartment of one of the college's many janitors, but this apartment had a microwave oven that had been used to desiccate several pieces of human fecal material—stuff that the young janitor called shit.

AS ASSISTANT PROFESSOR NEIL FROST ROCKED BACK IN HIS
wooden office chair he plunked his socked and sandaled feet on his desk and stared at the stack of exam booklets that awaited his attention.

He had a terrible urge to fail them all just to show them how unfair the real world was.

Without opening a single booklet he knew that more than 95 percent of them would be perfect or darn near perfect.